Anne Morgenstern’s Macht Liebe (the Chinese title is an editorial reference translation) treats the body as an unstable category. Across the photographs gathered here, flesh is sometimes sensuous, sometimes brutal, sometimes animate, sometimes reduced to the condition of an object. The figures depicted govern and are governed, and they resist the labels a viewer might bring to them. Morgenstern’s camera is at once unsparing and tender, and that double address—interrogation without cruelty—governs the book’s emotional register. Danaé Panchaud contributes an accompanying text; the photographer and the essay writer remain distinct roles.

The method is montage as much as portraiture. Photographs of human bodies are placed alongside images of objects, and the sequencing sets up rhymes of form, colour and materiality that leave neither term intact. A body borrows the properties of a thing; a thing acquires the charge of a body. What follows is a set of questions about gender and identity that the pictures pose rather than answer, and that they ask the reader to hold open.

The book appeared from Hartmann Books in 2022 with a trilingual apparatus in German, English and French. It is a substantial object: 192 pages and 134 illustrations, designed by Claudio Barandun and issued as an embossed softcover in Japanese binding with an inserted element. The design is not incidental to the argument; it controls pace and adjacency, and it is a large part of why the sequence reads as an essay in images rather than a portfolio.

Morgenstern, born in Leipzig in 1976 and based in Zurich, has shown at ICP New York, the Fotomuseum Winterthur and FOTODOKS Munich. Her earlier books include Land ohne Mitte, which received the German Photo Book Award in 2016, and Reinheit, a selection from which entered the collection of the Fotostiftung Schweiz. For readers attentive to contemporary photography’s treatment of the body as a political site, and to the photobook as a designed argument, this is a considered and consequential example.