Chloe Sells was a personal assistant to Hunter S. Thompson from 2003 until his death in 2005. Her book Hot Damn!, published by GOST Books in 2022, draws on that proximity without turning it into a memoir of celebrity. The photographs document the interior of Thompson’s home: his possessions, handwritten notes, the residue of a working life. Sells sets these images against the landscape of Aspen, Colorado, and against her own recollections of the time she spent there.

What distinguishes the project is its handling of the print itself. Sells hand-prints the photographs, then overlays some of them with traditional marbling techniques from Italy and Japan. The result is not documentary transparency but interference: pattern and color move across the surface of the image, unsettling the evidence. The method suits a subject whose public image was already a kind of construction, and it keeps the book from settling into the familiarity of the writer’s legend.

The book runs 184 pages in hardcover, and its publication coincided with an exhibition of the work at Galerie Miranda in Paris, from 4 November 2021 to 15 January 2022. Sells is credited as both photographer and author; the sequence is hers, and the written recollections are hers as well.

For a collector, the interest lies in that combination of access, craft, and restraint. This is a record of a place and a period made by someone who was present, then reworked through a printing process that refuses the easy read.