Khashayar Javanmardi grew up on the Iranian shore of the Caspian Sea, the largest enclosed body of water on earth, and has watched it decline under unregulated extraction, pollution, overfishing and a warming climate. His first photobook, Caspian: A Southern Reflection, is the opening chapter of a longer mapping of the region, and it stays close to the southern coast: the fishermen whose catches have collapsed, the households growing poorer as the water degrades, the industries and sewage that keep emptying into it.

Javanmardi’s approach holds two registers at once. There is atmospheric, almost sublime imagery of life along the shore, and there is plain documentary evidence of an environmental emergency. The book argues, through its sequencing, that these cannot be separated: systemic pollution and the texture of daily experience belong in the same frame. Across 75 colour plates he tracks both human dependence on the sea and the stubborn persistence of other life within it.

Loose Joints has built the volume around that tension. It is a section-sewn debossed hardcover, 285 by 245 mm, with 96 pages and texts by Nathalie Herschdorfer and the artist in English and Farsi; Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited and sequenced the work. The bilingual apparatus matters here, keeping the book’s Iranian subject and readership present rather than merely reported on.

For collectors, the case rests on sustained artistic attention rather than novelty. Javanmardi’s project is ongoing, and this first instalment already registers as an ambitious, politically grounded body of documentary work from a photographer who has been shortlisted for the Prix Elysee and recognised by the PhMuseum Photography Grant and the Un/Fund Award.