Ben Marcin’s The Holdouts gathers three bodies of work made in and around Baltimore, and the title is meant to stretch. In the inner city he photographs solo row houses—structures that outlasted the demolition that cleared everything around them. On the Eastern Shore he records farmhouses left behind when the last generation of a family died or moved away. And within Baltimore itself he turns to homeless encampments, camps that, according to the publisher, did not survive for more than a year. Some of these dwellings are centuries old; others are months old. Placed together, they ask what it means to remain in place when the reasons for staying have gone.

This is Marcin’s first photobook, which makes its formal confidence notable. The three sequences do not illustrate a single thesis so much as hold one another in tension: inherited rural architecture, urban survivors, and improvised shelters belong to different economies and different histories, yet the book’s juxtapositions draw out what they share—exposure, transience, the visible evidence of decisions made under pressure. The juxtaposition invites readers to consider how ownership, abandonment and insecure shelter shape the places people inhabit.

The publisher, GOST Books, has produced the volume as a clothbound hardback of 144 pages at roughly 29 by 26 centimetres, with four-colour reproduction throughout. That scale suits photographs whose subject is often the relation between a building and the emptiness around it; the sequence carries a cumulative weight that individual images would not.

For collectors, the case rests on the work rather than on any claim about the edition. Marcin treats the house as a record of circumstance—of industry, inheritance, displacement, and neglect—and the book’s three-part structure gives that inquiry a shape that a single series could not. It is a considered debut from a photographer who has found in one region’s margins a subject of wider consequence.