Yair Oelbaum’s Asleep in Dirt gathers seventy colour photographs made between 2014 and 2022, and it is the first publication devoted to his photographic work. Issued in 2024 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it follows more than a decade of practice that has also taken in sculpture, performance, video and sound. Oelbaum was born in West Hempstead, New York, in 1988 and now lives in the Hudson Valley, where he works as a clinical social worker; that biography is not decoration so much as part of how the pictures ask to be read.

The book begins with an object nobody wanted. In early 2014 Oelbaum’s father gave him a Polaroid Macro 5 that had sat unused in his office and was bound for disposal. The camera had been designed for dental and crime-scene recording, and its purpose in an artist’s hands was not immediately obvious. Through trial and error Oelbaum found that it could hold a quality he recognised in earlier images of his own but had never been able to reproduce deliberately.

What the camera records is ordinary: cast-off, found and constructed things. What the photographs deliver is less settled, forms and surfaces made elusive and abstract by staging, framing and the act of exposure. The title comes from Judaic language for the resurrection of the dead in Messianic times, which describes the deceased as asleep in dirt, waiting to be called back. Oelbaum attaches that condition to discarded matter, which follows a comparable arc toward what our own remains will become, and which is reanimated here through selection and photographic staging.

For a collector, the interest lies in the coherence of the project rather than in any claim of rarity: a sustained body of analog macro work, made with a Polaroid Macro 5 SLR and 35mm cameras with bellows, carried across eight years and given a first, considered book form by a publisher with a long commitment to artists’ photography. It is a quiet opening statement, and it holds together on its own terms.