Res’s Towers of Thanks takes as its subject an unusually intimate political inheritance. The photographer’s mother, Barbara Res, managed construction on Trump Tower and served as executive vice president of the Trump Organization for nearly two decades, then turned publicly against Trump during the 2016 campaign. Across thirty-two pages and twenty-six colour plates, Res builds a photographic sequence that moves between archival imagery of the organization and their own interpretations of their mother, of Trump Tower itself, and of the machinery by which photography manufactures myths of power and success.

The book’s tension lies in the collision of registers. Trump’s language, as the sequence frames it, slides from effusive praise to terse online condemnation, and the pictures track how that shift presses on a family. Political and personal narratives do not sit comfortably side by side here; the sequencing keeps exposing the seam between them. That discomfort is the point, and it gives the work a tone closer to forensic inquiry than to memoir.

Design and format matter to the reading. The stapled booklet with card cover, at 210 by 260 millimetres, is modest in extent but deliberate in pace: a compact sequence in which each plate carries weight. Published by Loose Joints in September 2017, the book was shortlisted for the Lucie Photobook Prize in 2018.

For collectors of photobooks that address the image economy of political power, this is a considered early work by an artist trained in sociology and studio art at Smith College and in photography at Yale School of Art, with exhibition history in the United States and an ongoing New York practice. Its subject has not lost its urgency.