My America gathers photographs Diana Matar made at locations across the United States where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers. Published by GOST Books in 2024, the book functions as both an archive and a memorial: an accumulation of sites that, taken together, records a pattern of lethal police encounters occurring at a rate the publisher describes as higher than in any other industrialized nation. The publisher’s description notes that approximately 1,000 people continue to die each year in such encounters in the US.

The approach is deliberately restrained. Rather than dramatizing events, the photographs create what the publisher calls a ‘quiet but chilling critique’ of the contemporary United States. By returning to the physical coordinates of each death, the book resists the abstraction that statistics encourage, asking readers to register that each figure was an individual. At 304 pages in hardback, its extent is itself part of the argument: the scale of the book attests to the scale of the problem, as the publisher frames it.

The book’s significance for collectors rests on that formal choice as much as on its subject. The combination of a clear conceptual frame, credited photographic authorship by Matar, and production by GOST Books gives the object coherence. It is a book that rewards slow looking, and one whose subject makes its restraint the more pointed.