In 2013 the London publisher MACK released *Gasoline*, a book assembled by the writer and curator David Campany. Its images are not commissioned work but thirty-five press photographs of gas stations, made between 1944 and 1995 and gathered from the picture archives of several American newspapers. Campany chose the pictures and wrote the accompanying text; the photographers who originally made them are not named.

The gas station is one of the defining buildings of the twentieth century, and nowhere more so than in the United States, where a full tank and an open road hardened into a cultural formula. *Gasoline* takes that familiar subject and returns it to the circumstances of its first appearance: the newspaper page. Deadline conditions show in the prints. Grease-pencil notations left by art directors — crops, captions, instructions — remain on the surfaces, and the editing lets them stay.

The sequence moves through oil shortages, traffic, accidents, crime and the fouled air of crowded cities. Yet the book is also about news photography itself: how a picture is trimmed to fit a column, filed, then forgotten. These prints reached Campany because newspapers were clearing out their analogue collections and shifting to digital files, a change the book quietly registers.

Single frames, read one at a time, are only moments. Read together they describe a widening public awareness of cars, the oil trade and pollution, and, incidentally, a short history of car design and ordinary roadside architecture. The book has been framed as a cautionary tale about dependence on oil; it is equally a study of how a society’s images of itself are produced and then discarded.

For a collector, the interest lies in that double address. *Gasoline* takes anonymous, utilitarian material and gives it the shape of a considered book, with a writer’s argument behind the sequencing rather than a single photographer’s eye. It is an instructive example of how the photographic archive can be read, and a reminder that ordinary printed matter often preserves the sharpest record of its moment.