Carolyn Drake’s *Men Untitled* arrives after *Knit Club*, her long study of a community of women in rural Mississippi, and it turns her attention to a different problem: the myths of masculinity in American culture. What distinguishes the book is how little it concedes to setting. Drake removes nearly every sign of place, so that the photographs press the viewer close to male bodies — nude or half-dressed, twisted, bent, faced away, wearing furniture, hung upside down — without the buffer of geography or documentary context.

The men are not simply specimens. They appear at ease, and the book leaves open the possibility that they are collaborating with the photographer. That ambiguity is central to the work’s temperament. Portraits are broken by still lifes: an anatomical model of male genitalia on a velvet chair, a charred board of nails standing upright, a snake coiled around an empty window frame. The props carry the symbolic weight the locations have been denied.

A booklet, with text in English and French, holds Drake’s epilogue, in which she recounts the personal experiences that set the series in motion. The series was produced with the 2021 HCB Award from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. TBW Books issued it in 2023 as a soft flexicover with flaps, an embossed tip-on and a booklet: 118 pages, 33 color and 23 duotone plates, 229 x 298 mm, each copy signed by the artist.

For collectors, the case rests on sequence and design as much as on individual frames. Drake has long worked in extended projects, and this book compresses one into a deliberate object, where format, printing and the written afterword are part of the argument. It follows *Knit Club* while reversing its premises, and it stands as a considered response to a subject that photography has often handled too easily.