In Philadelphia, in a vacant lot behind his home, Jordan Baumgarten spent a decade photographing his neighbours. The black-and-white pictures in The Group For Mutual Improvement come out of that shared ground — an unremarkable patch of city that became, over ten years, a place of regular company. The book, published by GOST Books in 2024, is a record of those gatherings. Baumgarten is its photographer; the lot and the people who used it are its subject.

The title borrows from the Junto, the Leather Apron Club that Benjamin Franklin convened in colonial-era Philadelphia so that a mixed group could debate morals, politics, current events, philosophy, and local business. Baumgarten’s own group is described as less formal, but the conversations in the lot carry comparable weight. The parallel is structural rather than nostalgic: it gives the photographs a frame of civic speech and ordinary argument, and it places a contemporary neighbourhood within a longer Philadelphia habit of meeting to talk things through.

This is not reportage from a distance but picture-making inside a daily life, sustained across ten years by someone who lived beside the people he photographed. The book is a hardback of 96 pages, modest in extent, and its black-and-white photographs are the substance of the project. It documents a form of neighbourliness that is easily overlooked. Its attention is local, and its subject is how people keep each other’s company.