Bobby Doherty built his reputation as a still-life photographer of unusual precision, a staff photographer at New York Magazine from 2013 to 2018 whose commercial work has included campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Apple, and others. His first book, Seabird, appeared from Loose Joints in 2018. Dream About Nothing, published by the same house in 2023, is not a simple continuation. Where the earlier work often warmed its subjects with color and inviting composition, this book withholds that comfort. Across roughly five years of photographing inside and outside the studio, Doherty has assembled sequences in which individual pictures remain legible—a flower, a drinks can, a courgette, an alloy wheel—while their collective meaning slides. A popsicle takes on different weight when it faces a battered butterfly. Categories break down. The question the book keeps asking is not why this object over that one, but why anything at all.
The book’s method is relational rather than thematic. Its seventy color plates are rhymed and bonded into arrangements where ordinary things and places are placed with the same care usually reserved for the remarkable, and the distinction between the two erodes. Lauren Cook contributes a text, and Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume at Loose Joints Studio; the book was designed and published by Loose Joints. The physical object is deliberately plain and sturdy: 120 pages, 240 by 305 millimeters, section-sewn and bound in a silkscreened hard cover. The restraint suits the argument.
For collectors of contemporary still life and observational photography, the book’s interest lies in its skepticism. Doherty is not using sequence to build a narrative or a manifesto. He is testing whether a photographic voice can survive the removal of the conventions—category, hierarchy, visual pleasure as reassurance—that usually hold such work together. The result is uncomfortable on purpose, and it asks more of the viewer at each page than the brightness of the images initially suggests. Reading it is less like browsing a portfolio than following an argument about attention itself.
This is a considered, self-aware book from a photographer whose commercial fluency has not dulled his appetite for doubt. It rewards slow looking and repeat visits, and it belongs in collections that treat the photobook as a space for thinking rather than display.
