Atlanta has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over, and Joshua Dudley Greer photographs a city still negotiating that inheritance. The Makeshift City, published by GOST Books in 2024, considers the Georgia capital as a place pulled between two conditions at once: a metropolis with its own particular history and culture, and an American city whose newer development could belong almost anywhere. Greer’s subject is not architecture as monument but the provisional arrangements through which a city keeps remaking itself.
The book avoids a survey of landmarks. Across its pages, Atlanta appears as a landscape of transition, where the memory of destruction, slavery, and segregation, and the city’s later importance to the Civil Rights Movement, sit alongside the political shift that turned Georgia into a blue island among red neighbours. Those histories are the book’s context, not simply its captions; they shape how its images read as evidence of a place under pressure.
What distinguishes The Makeshift City is this double vision. It holds the specific and the generic in the same frame. That Greer made the work in and about a single city gives it a coherence that city books often lack: readers follow an argument about identity and change rather than a tour. The publisher lists the book at 144 pages in hardback.
For readers of contemporary American photography and urban subjects, the book is worth attention for exactly this concentration. It documents a Southern city in flux at a moment of visible transformation, and it does so with a photographer’s patience rather than a news cycle’s urgency. Atlanta’s story is local, but the questions it raises about how cities remember and rebuild are not.
