Daniel Jack Lyons arrived in the Amazon through social and medical anthropology rather than photojournalism, and that formation shapes his first monograph. Working with Casa do Rio, a community organization that supports the cultural lives of teenagers in the region, Lyons photographs trans and queer young people as they move through adolescence — affirming individuality where environmental degradation, violence, and discrimination press against it.

Like a River sets out to show where inherited indigenous practice and contemporary identity politics meet, and to treat that meeting as a safe and celebratory space rather than a subject of diagnosis. The book’s central question is generational: as these teenagers pass through the ordinary rites of coming of age, what world will they inherit, and how much say will they have in it? Seventy photographs carry that question across 112 pages.

Published by Loose Joints in 2022 at 225 × 265 mm, the book is a debossed hardcover with a dust jacket, produced using recycled materials. The physical restraint suits the material. Nothing here is inflated for effect. Lyons has exhibited widely and published in the New York Times, i-D, the New Yorker, and Vogue Italia; the book was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022 and nominated for the Prix du Livre at Arles in 2023.

For a collector, the case rests less on scarcity claims than on the work itself: a sustained collaboration with a specific community, a clear anthropological lineage, and a debut that already carries exhibition and award recognition. Like a River belongs with photobooks that treat representation as a form of care.