The Hand, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2007, takes the hand as a concentrated subject in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography. Rather than treating it as a minor detail within the portrait, the book considers the hand as a bearer of bodily gesture and identity—an element capable of indicating character, occupation, intimacy, or formal presence without the explanatory completeness of the face.

Joëlle Bolloch is credited as the author, while the photographs draw on the work of several photographers, including André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Félix Nadar, Auguste Vacquerie, and Alfred Stieglitz. The selection brings different photographic practices into dialogue through a shared attention to bodily expression and the visual language of the portrait. Its subject also extends into the cultural history surrounding figures and artists such as Nijinsky, George Sand, Degas, and Rodin, whose hands can be understood as sites where performance, artistic identity, and representation meet.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in the precision of its premise. By isolating one part of the body, it asks how photography constructs meaning through selection, pose, and gesture, and how a fragment may carry the force of a complete portrait. The subject is narrow, but the implications are broad: the hand belongs equally to portraiture, sculpture, dance, social history, and the study of photographic form.

The 2007 English edition is a compact 96-page softcover measuring 16 × 16 cm. That modest format suits a book whose argument depends on close attention rather than spectacle. It offers a historically grounded, carefully bounded contribution to photographic study, and deserves attention from collectors interested in books that turn a seemingly familiar motif into a sustained inquiry into identity and the expressive body.