Daniel Gordon makes photographs the slow way. In his Brooklyn studio, images of still-life subjects he finds on the Internet are printed on paper, cut out, and assembled into a three-dimensional tableau; only then does he photograph it. New Canvas, published by Chose Commune in 2022, traces that working method. Gordon cuts, builds, experiments and photographs, and his relationship to photography is intrinsically linked to his process.

The volume pairs finished works with the stages that precede them, emphasizing the different layers that compose his photographs. Susan Thompson contributes the text; editorial direction is by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi and design by Akiko Wakabayashi. Gordon, born in Boston in 1980, lives and works in Brooklyn. He received a BA from Bard College in 2003 and an MFA from Yale University in 2006. His practice links handmade and digital-based processes and materials.

Because the book is bilingual in French and English, it speaks to more than one readership at once. The Swiss binding, hardcover format, and the different-sized pages extend the layered logic inside the pictures. Across 160 pages and 104 plates, New Canvas is described by the publisher as arguably the most comprehensive monograph of the artist to date, one in which the process behind the finished print is shown alongside it.

For collectors attentive to how a photographer’s thinking is translated into book form, that combination is the reason to look closely: an artist whose subject is fabrication, an editor and designer who refuse to smooth the seams, and a publisher whose catalogue treats the photobook as a considered object.