Ricky Adam’s M1 takes the 193-mile motorway between London and Leeds as its field of study, but its subject is found not in the traffic or infrastructure. Across twenty photographs made between 2015 and 2017, Adam records discarded bottles of urine encountered at service stations and along the route. The premise is blunt; the photographic attention is measured. Variations in colour, volume, container and setting turn an apparently negligible form of roadside waste into a precise index of bodily difference, commercial sameness and the habits produced by long-distance travel.

The book’s force lies in the tension between cataloguing and implication. Plastic bottles carry the marks of branded consumption, while their contents point to bodies working under conditions in which time is compressed and rest is negotiable. The M1 becomes both a specific British road and a metonym for highways more broadly: a passage through which goods, labour and waste circulate together. What might first invite voyeurism gradually acquires a social and environmental charge, as the photographs ask what kinds of work and urgency have left these intimate remnants behind.

M1 is therefore less a collection of curiosities than a tightly bounded documentary project whose subject expands through sequence. Its short form—twenty photographs in a 52-page, English-language paperback—keeps the encounter concentrated, allowing repetition to do analytical work rather than merely accumulate shock. Steven Zultanski’s inserted-sheet text extends the photographs’ reading toward labour, disposable commodities and environmental degradation, while Aidan Winterburn is also credited as a contributor. Published by Audit in 2018 as a first edition, the book deserves attention from collectors interested in photobooks that find structural questions in overlooked evidence, and that make the design of a modest series carry the weight of a larger social landscape.