Loose Joints published Bobby Doherty’s *Seabird* in September 2018: a 224-page section-sewn hardcover with a printed and embossed linen cover, measuring 16 by 24 centimeters, gathering 169 color plates made between 2014 and 2018. Doherty, an American photographer born in 1989 in Brewster, New York, received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts and was staff photographer at New York Magazine from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in *Feast for the Eyes* (Aperture, 2017) and in publications including the *British Journal of Photography* and *Vice*; his clients include The Museum of Modern Art, Bergdorf Goodman, Apple, *The New York Times* and *Time Magazine*.
The photographs resist a single subject. Doherty treats still life, landscape, portrait and street observation with equal attention, so that cut flowers and city trash, dew on a leaf and a red tablecloth, animals and food share the page without hierarchy—a kind of photographic egalitarianism in which the mundane and the sublime are given equal weight. Some images are radically simplified, objects reduced to their clearest, most saturated essentials; others rely on juxtaposition that shifts from greeting-card kitsch to wry wit to absurdity. Throughout, a forensic scrutiny of detail, color and form keeps the looseness from becoming casual. The sequencing suggests changing moods and shifting emotions rather than a fixed argument.
Doherty avoids categorization and resists overanalyzing his own pictures, placing himself instead in a lineage of photographers driven to make images consistently and extensively, without concern for cohesion or retrospection. That openness is the book’s method: *Seabird* does not illustrate a thesis; it accumulates. The 169 plates form a human tapestry in which the meaningful and the meaningless are embraced with equal measure.
For collectors, the appeal lies in seeing a photographer’s daily practice translated into a considered object; the book’s physical construction, sequencing and refusal of a single genre make it a useful record of a particular approach to image-making in the late 2010s. A special edition was also issued, comprising a signed book with an alternative blue cover and one of five hand-printed images, each in an edition of 10.
