Painting Photographs gathers seventy-six pages of work in which Alice Wong takes up vintage vernacular pictures—the family-album snapshot, the postcard plant, the roadside landscape—and works over them with paint markers. She both heightens and hides what the camera originally recorded, pushing found photographs toward flat, saturated abstraction. The result is neither straight photography nor conventional painting but a hybrid in which each mark redirects how the underlying image is read. Published by TBW Books in 2023, the volume presents fifty-eight color plates alongside a separate booklet, issued in a flexicover binding.

The book’s method is cumulative rather than merely decorative. Across the sequence, Wong’s color-blocking and fluid line gradually retrain the eye, so that compositions once dismissed as cliché begin to hold attention on their own terms. Her intervention honors the anonymous origins of the material while refusing nostalgia; the pictures feel simultaneously tied to an earlier moment of amateur image-making and entirely of the present. That double position is the book’s real subject, and it is carried by the pacing of the plates as much as by any single sheet.

Wong is an artist at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, the nonprofit studio founded in 1974 for artists with developmental disabilities, where she has worked within a professional environment of studio practice, exhibition, and representation. Painting Photographs was shortlisted for the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, a recognition that speaks to how the project was received within photobook publishing rather than to its market performance.

For collectors drawn to work that tests the boundary between photographic and painted images, this is a considered example: an artist’s book with its own internal logic, a distinct physical object at roughly 24 by 30 centimeters, and a record of a practice whose concerns extend well beyond the single frame.