Hudson Hayden’s Notwithstanding is a study in the grammar of photography, and in the invisible design of observed life. Across a sequence of microcosms, the Canadian artist—working since 2016 from Berlin—assembles pictures that are precise without being rigid, and laconic without being cold. A dog, a ball, a boat on a lake, an orange in a bowl: the referents are plain, yet the images resist settling into simple description, and that resistance is the point.

The book draws its wit from quotation. Hayden moves through the cool of early postmodern colour, the sanitised language of advertising, and the semiotic habits of contemporary image culture, letting forms collapse onto the photographic plane until they become shapes that dance. Sequencing does the rest, bending narrative in ways a single frame cannot. The result is a body of speech acts—off-kilter, optimistic, and affectionate toward the medium even as it tests its categories.

Loose Joints published the book in September 2023, edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio, with Hayden credited as photographer. Ninety-six pages in a section-sewn OTA-bound softcover, at 165 × 230 mm, with a delicately debossed grid and tip-on. The design is quiet and exact, and it serves the pictures rather than framing them.

For a collector, the appeal lies in Hayden’s method: an instinctive practice that treats the everyday as an icon through the act of photographing it, and a sequence that rewards re-reading. Notwithstanding is less a statement than an attitude, and its indeterminacy is its strength.