Between 2014 and 2018, Roger Palmer drove the minor roads that shadow South Africa’s rail routes, through all nine provinces, accumulating colour photographs of towns and settlements strung along the lines. The title carries a double sense: in Afrikaans, a spoor is a rail track; more widely, it names the trace an animal or person leaves behind. That ambiguity sits at the heart of the book, where the railway is both a visible infrastructure and a historical residue, a route into places whose fortunes were shaped by the movement of goods, labour, and people.

Palmer’s approach is deliberative rather than documentary in the conventional sense. He works in groups, allowing sequences of images to establish rhythm and relation rather than treating each photograph as an isolated record. The cumulative effect is attentive to the ordinary textures of settlement life and to the way rail corridors continue to organise space long after their original economic rationale has faded. The photographs are restrained, precise, and resistant to easy narrative; their interest lies in what accumulates across the sequence.

GOST Books published the volume in 2019 as a 208-page hardback with a laser-cut jacket. That jacket is not merely decorative: its cut apertures echo the book’s concern with routes, apertures, and lines of sight, making the physical object participate in the photographic argument. The design supports the work without overwhelming it, and the sequencing gives the collection a considered pace.

For collectors engaged with contemporary landscape photography, southern African histories, or the photobook as a designed sequence, SPOOR offers a substantial body of work by a photographer whose practice has long examined place, memory, and the infrastructures that connect them. It rewards slow reading rather than quick browsing. The book’s significance rests in Palmer’s patient attention and in the way the photographs themselves, rather than any extrinsic claim, establish the case for looking closely.