Panama tends to arrive pre-packaged: the canal, the brochures, the recent political headlines. Arturo Soto’s In the Heat declines all of it. Working in Panama City, the Mexican photographer turns toward the ordinary fabric of the urban landscape and the humid, oppressive weather that gives the book its title. What he records is not the postcard but the mall arcade, the residential block, the half-empty space between planned ambition and daily use. Kevin Coleman, a historian of Latin America, contributes an essay that reads the megamalls and their attached hotels as air-conditioned temples of consumption — a Panama that shoppers from Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia know well, and that visitors to Soto’s photographs will not find.

The project is subjective by design. Soto withholds the saturated colour and exotic scenery through which the country is usually promoted, and in doing so lets banal spaces speak against confident narratives of progress and economic growth. He does not frame the work as social critique, yet the photographs attend closely to the uneven social values and disparities written into the built environment. Heat, here, is both climate and condition: a pressure that shapes how a city is inhabited.

The book is compact and deliberate — sixty-four pages at 230 × 302 mm, issued by The Eriskay Connection in a flexible hardcover. Rob van Hoesel’s design, with lithography by Marc Gijzen and printing by NPN, treats the sequence as an argument rather than an album; the format suits a body of work that depends on accumulation and adjacency. An essay by a scholar of the region gives the pictures a historical frame without overdetermining them.

For collectors of contemporary documentary and urban landscape photography, In the Heat is a considered example of the photobook as critical form: a national image dismantled from the inside, in a sequence built to resist the very promotional logic it examines.