Aaron Schuman’s SONATA, published by MACK in 2022, is a 120-page hardcover of photographs made in Italy over four years. The work does not pretend to document the country objectively. Instead, Schuman filters what he sees through the accumulation of ideas, fascinations, and fantasies that Italy has provoked in centuries of visitors. The result is a book about perception as much as place.

The guiding reference is Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786–1788). Schuman follows Goethe’s pursuit of “sense-impressions” and returns to questions Goethe posed while travelling: whether observation can renew one’s interest in life, whether one can see with clear, fresh eyes, how much can be taken in at a glance, and whether old mental habits can be worn away. The photographs answer with details rather than monuments: cracks spreading across ancient statues and museum walls, paths worn by millennia of footsteps, the looming eyes of saints and gods, dust, bones, sunlight, lucky pennies. The tone is curious, quizzical, atmospheric—a foreigner’s alertness to quirks and mysteries.

The book’s shape comes from classical sonata form. Three movements—exposition, development, recapitulation—organise the sequence and invite the viewer to move through an Italy of the mind. It is a country soaked in the euphoria and terror, harmony and dissonance of its cultural and historical legacies, yet still capable of feeling new, invigorating, and resonant.

For collectors, SONATA is notable for the seriousness with which it treats sequence and design. The debossed and printed hardcover, 17 x 24 cm, and 120 pages support a work in which photographs are not isolated plates but parts of a composed argument. Schuman’s project treats travel as a prompt for introspection, and its structure—borrowed from music—gives the material a distinctive logic. It rewards attention to how images are ordered, not only to what they show.