Collecting Hands is the first edition of Monaris’s 2025 book, published by Setanta Books as a 104-page hardback with a dust jacket. The volume gathers 95 images and measures 245 by 173 mm. Its construction extends the theme of the photographs: an eight-page booklet sits in the middle, an eight-page gatefold opens within the sequence, and two tracing-paper inserts and two yellow cut-card inserts interrupt the turning of pages like objects placed between pictures.

The book includes text by Dave Krugman, whose contribution is a written essay rather than additional photographs. In his extract, he writes of worlds emerging from Monaris’s carefully cropped frames, listing a small box wrapped in silver foil and bound with string, an unlit cigar, a beaded keychain with keys to some unknown door, a pinstriped bag, an upturned cane, a battered black umbrella, and a shined black leather shoe whose outlines are creased with age. These are the kinds of encounters the book crops and collects.

Krugman describes Monaris as a master of such moments and adept not only at capturing them but also at curating them, linking the photographs to the drive to recognize and collect patterns. Each image, he writes, is a thread in a wider tapestry, parts to a whole, and with each repetition the story becomes clearer; in his words, our hands hold our humanity.

Alongside the regular edition, Setanta Books lists a special edition with prints. Each print is in an edition of 20 numbered and stamped copies, signed and numbered by Monaris on verso and printed on Hahnemuhle Pearl paper at 24 x 16 cm / 9 x 6 in, with a 1 cm / 0.4 in white border. The publisher notes that the special edition will go up in price in increments as the edition sells through, and that the special edition with all 4 prints is limited to 5 copies only.