Jet Swan’s first monograph, Material, gathers three years of portrait sessions conducted in improvised studios: an empty shopfront inside a commercial mall in Scarborough, and a repurposed community hall in Ramsgate, Kent, where the artist lives and works. The setting matters less as backdrop than as pressure — a provisional room where strangers agree, briefly, to be looked at. Across 110 photographs, Swan holds the public identities people carry into such a space against something more private and tactile: images of the body, and frames that sit at the edges of staged portraiture without settling into it. The book’s title is exact. Skin, clothing, posture, and the small negotiations of a sitting are treated as material to be worked rather than as character to be revealed.

Published by Loose Joints in 2021, Material is clothbound and silkscreened, with 172 pages and a compact 197 × 242 mm trim. Rachael Allen contributes a new text in response, and Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume — roles distinct from the photographer’s, and worth noting for how the book positions Swan’s images alongside writing rather than merely documenting them. Swan, born in 1990 in North Yorkshire, works between documentary and classical portraiture; Material is where that dual inheritance is put under strain rather than resolved.

For collectors, the interest lies in the sequence and the object. The book sets communal, forward-facing portraits against darker, more enclosed pictures, so that turning pages becomes an argument about what a portrait can hold. The result is a first monograph that reads as a considered piece of bookmaking, and one that rewards attention to how Swan’s sitters — and her editing — manage the distance between being seen and being known.