Published by MACK in November 2012, NYLPT gathers Jason Evans’s photographs made across New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. The book draws from a single body of work, but its images appear in distinct digital and analogue forms, setting up a productive tension between photographic processes and the visual habits associated with the street.

Evans approaches street photography as a tradition already shaped—and aesthetically colonised—by familiar precedents. His interest lies in what happens when those precedents are encountered in the world: a place can resemble the pictures, films and television images through which it has been imagined, producing “nostalgia for something you’ve never known.” Rather than treating recognition as confirmation, NYLPT uses it as a point of instability, where the expected and the encountered begin to diverge.

The work is driven by compulsive visual collecting, but not by simple accumulation. Recurrent motifs are framed through an informed yet intuitive process, while chance, luck and persistence remain active elements of the method. Evans randomly layers exposures on film in the camera, allowing images to emerge through decisions that deliberately leave room for surprise. The resulting photographs can feel at once familiar and strange: less records of place than instances of visual thinking, formed through attention, repetition and the refusal to over-determine what a picture should become.

For collectors, the book’s significance rests in this sustained negotiation between street-photographic convention and open-ended experiment. Its geographical range is broad, but the organising principle is not a catalogue of cities; it is Evans’s process and his recurring attention to motifs, expectation and accident. NYLPT therefore merits close consideration as a concise presentation of a photographer testing how collected images can be re-seen, re-layered and made unfamiliar.