Seth Lower’s Units brings together photographs made between 1994 and 2017, and its title works less as a label than as a question. The pictures keep mostly to ordinary things: a small collection of funnels, a stove offered for sale in sunlight, a sign slowly swallowed by tree bark. Again and again the subject is stuff in sets, parts, or multiples, arranged so that counting seems both natural and unreliable.

What holds the book together is Lower’s attention to integrity — or to its absence. He photographs objects and situations where standards of measurement, materiality, and the vague boundaries of entities and experience come under pressure. Where does one unit end and the next begin? A thing can belong to a larger system and still keep its own character; the book asks whether that says something about the units themselves or only about the definitions we bring to them.

A line quoted from Graham Harman gives the argument its sharpest form: such pieces are ‘terminal points, closed-off neighborhoods that retain their local identity despite the broader systems into which they are partly absorbed.’ Lower’s pictures are quiet, but the thinking behind them is not casual, and the sequence lets a philosophical problem emerge from looking rather than from explanation.

MACK published the book in 2019 as a hardcover of modest proportion, 23 by 18 cm. For collectors, its interest lies in the span of the project — more than two decades of looking, condensed — and in the way a long-running photographic inquiry into objecthood, classification, and the everyday is given a single, deliberate form. It is a book that rewards returning to particular images rather than consuming the whole at once.