Stir the Pot is a group book rather than a monograph. Overlapse gathered work from ninety-nine photographers and artists based in twenty-five countries, at markedly different stages of their careers, and published the result as a 180-page paperback in 2024. The book grew out of an open call, and that origin shapes how it reads: it is a gathering, not a survey with a thesis to defend.

The call framed its theme around nourishment — internal and external — and asked how anyone keeps steady in a hostile, agitating present, and how attention gets divided between acting in the world and simply enduring it. The selected work answers obliquely. Some contributors turn to the creative process itself; others to cooking and family; others to social action and collective responsibility. What connects them is less a style than a shared subject: whatever gave the maker room to breathe.

The publication is described as collaborative photography and mixed media, and the range of forms, shapes and textures is part of the point. Ninety-nine hands produce ninety-nine different arguments about what a photograph can be. Editing and sequencing carry the burden of making that plurality legible, and the book’s conversational tone is an editorial achievement rather than an accident.

For a collector, the interest lies in what this kind of book records. It is a cross-section of an open-call moment in contemporary photography, launched at the New York Art Book Fair in 2024, and it holds the particular energy of a group assembled around a single prompt. It is best approached as an ensemble: a portrait of many dispersed makers, kept together by paper and by the decision to place them in one another’s company.