a Handful of Dust (Second Edition), published by MACK in 2015, takes Man Ray’s Dust Breeding as its point of departure and builds from it a speculative history of the twentieth century. The photograph—made of a dust-covered sheet of glass associated with Marcel Duchamp—occupies an unstable position between abstraction and record, artwork and document. That ambiguity gives David Campany’s project its governing question: what might dust reveal about the modern era and its suppressed histories?

Campany’s selection moves across aerial reconnaissance, the American Dust Bowl, political violence, war, landscape and domestic disorder. The book places named photographic works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington and Jeff Wall alongside anonymous press photographs, postcards, magazine pages and films. Rather than treating photography as a neutral instrument of modern order, it follows dust as both material and metaphor: the residue that cameras are meant to exclude, yet repeatedly find compelling.

The result is not a single-author photobook but an edited constellation of images and sources, shaped by Campany’s writing and curatorial method. Its historical reach is matched by a deliberately unsettled visual logic, in which the documentary and the poetic continually exchange places. Published in connection with Campany’s exhibition at Le Bal, Paris, the 232-page second edition offers serious collectors a concentrated example of how photographic history can be reconstructed through juxtaposition, association and doubt. Its value lies in the precision of that editorial proposition: dust becomes an unlikely organising principle for thinking about modernity, its ideals of clarity, and what those ideals leave behind.