Talia Chetrit’s JOKE, published by MACK in 2022, is a 128-page hardcover that refuses a single register. Family photographs sit alongside street pictures, still lifes, images drawn from the artist’s own teenage archive, and self-portraits staged with a cast of participants who are, by turns, willing and oblivious. Chetrit has spent years testing how photographs are made and what they are asked to mean; here those inquiries run through a deliberately mixed vocabulary.

The recurring subject is the exchange between photographer and subject — the negotiation, the sparring, the occasional collusion. Because Chetrit appears in and around so many of these pictures, and because her collaborators occupy positions that keep shifting, the conventions of portraiture, of the street, of the domestic snapshot and the studio still life are treated as material to be handled and turned over rather than inherited. The category a picture seems to belong to settles nothing.

The tone moves between high humour and something much colder. Social roles reverse; norms are examined rather than obeyed; judgements of taste and value are held in suspension. Living and dead, true and false, sincere and affected converge, often within the space of a spread. The book can read as a joke and as a reckoning at once, and Chetrit does not appear eager to resolve the contradiction.

For a collector, part of the interest is the object itself: a debossed hardcover with a tip-in, 24 by 31.5 centimetres, in which the sequence does the arguing. But the interest lies mainly in the work. Chetrit treats photographic tropes as carriers of assumptions about who may look, who may be looked at, and how a subject — including the artist — is produced by being pictured. Placing the teenage archive in this company is not nostalgia; it shows how long the questions have been running.