Morgan Ashcom’s What the Living Carry (MACK, 2017) locates its drama in Hoy’s Fork, a small town in the American South assembled from memory, invention, and the uneasy residue between them. Drawing on the rural Virginia setting in which Ashcom grew up, the book follows a trail through streets, homes, and surrounding forest, where ordinary gestures acquire an ominous charge: an old man reclines with champagne on the corroding steps of a once-grand house; a bloodied mattress crosses an overgrown field; a child disappears into meadow grass; a man cleans a white picket fence beneath a mural depicting a distant ancient land.

Photography is only one element of the book’s construction. Typewritten letters and a hand-drawn map extend the images into a fractured narrative, while four letters from “Eugene” at the “Center for Epigenetics and Wellness of the Spirit” answer a request attributed to “Morgan” for DNA analysis. These documents introduce questions of inheritance, familial connection, and origin without resolving them. Rather than offering a stable account of place, Ashcom builds a fictional record whose clues remain deliberately difficult to assemble.

That tension between autobiography and invention gives the work its particular force. The photographs appear to document a community, yet the community continually slips into allegory, suspense, and uncertainty; the book’s sequence asks the reader to move between evidence and projection. At 144 pages, in a debossed hardback with a tipped-in image, What the Living Carry is a carefully integrated artist’s book in which design, text, and image share responsibility for the narrative. For collectors, its significance lies in this sustained refusal of clear boundaries: it is a photographic work about memory and belonging that makes its own form part of the mystery.