Mavis CW’s Somewhere Between Living and Dreaming brings together photographs made in New York, where the street serves as both stage and pressure gauge. Published by Setanta Books in 2023, the book gathers 67 images across 132 pages, in a hardcover volume of 240 × 285 mm. CW, a British photographer born in Taipei, works along what the publisher calls the continuum of living and dreaming: the daily effort to survive and to thrive, and the moments when that effort slackens into reverie or hardens into struggle. The city is not a backdrop here but a canvas whose surface is soft for some and unforgiving for others.

The sequencing moves among people whose stories are already underway, observing them rather than explaining them. CW’s approach is patient and immersive; she floats above and around her subjects, allowing the ordinary textures of New York—its sidewalks, waiting, motion, and stillness—to carry the emotional weight. The photographs do not insist on a single mood. Instead they hold contradiction: aspiration and exhaustion, sociability and solitude, the dream that sustains and the dream that defers.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in its sustained attention to a classic subject without falling back on familiar tropes. The generous trim size gives the images room, and the sequencing is deliberate, building a rhythm that rewards repeated looking. Setanta Books has become a thoughtful publisher of photographic work, and this title extends that reputation. While a special edition with prints exists, the standard hardcover itself is the primary object: a coherent body of work by a photographer whose vision is distinct and whose subject—New York as a place where lives are both lived and imagined—remains inexhaustible.