Franck Bohbot’s *Back to the Arcade* (Setanta Books, 2023) is a sequence of 148 color photographs made in Los Angeles arcades, published as a 164-page hardcover at 30 by 24 centimeters. An essay by Raymond Gaston accompanies the plates. The photographs picture the rooms and the machines together with the people who gather around them, and the title positions the arcade as a place returned to rather than merely visited.

Many of the descriptions here are deliberately cinematic. Bohbot, a photographer and filmmaker, treats each arcade less as a documentary subject than as an enclosed world with its own social codes. The images suggest secrecy and belonging at once—machines kept in collections, players absorbed at close range, rooms lit by the glow of screens. The sequence reads like a short film in stills, moving between the architecture of the spaces and the rituals that fill them.

What distinguishes the work is its attention to time. The book’s arcades hold a particular idea of the present: people alone in public, pursuing fantasy in company. Bohbot’s saturated color and careful framing have struck readers as film-noir in atmosphere, but the subject is everyday and contemporary, rooted in Los Angeles and in communities of enthusiasts who keep these machines and these places alive.

Collectors drawn to color photography, to the visual culture of games, or to sustained bodies of work about a single city will find a coherent project here: a specific series, with a complete and credited photographic authorship and an accompanying essay, rather than a survey or an anthology.