For the fifth instalment of its bimonthly series with Open Doors Gallery, Setanta Books turns to Dino Kuznik, a New York-based photographer who grew up in Slovenia. The book gathers his work in a compact softcover volume — 48 pages at roughly 21 by 16 centimetres, wrapped in a card cover — the same pocket-scale format the series has used to introduce emerging photographers, among them Luka Khabelashvili, Margaret Durow, Michael McCluskey and Hollie Fernando.

Kuznik’s subject is displacement and its symbols. His statement traces his attraction to American imagery to the 1990s westernization of Slovenia, when the country set about burying its socialist past and television, music and print supplied a ready-made vocabulary of American aspiration. Composition and colour serve that vocabulary; his stated working method is immersion and solitude, a frame of mind he describes as reachable only after long habitation in a place. The photographs accordingly treat the American scene as received mythology rather than discovery. A journalistic background and years of retouching and graphic design inform the tonal control, but the project’s real argument is retroactive: a childhood dream arrived at, and found to differ sharply from its advertising.

What distinguishes the book within the series is that Kuznik’s Slovenian vantage gives familiar American motifs a second exposure. The promise and the letdown sit in the same frame, so the sequence reads as a reckoning with influence rather than a record of travel.

It was published in 2021 in an edition of 300 copies, and the publisher lists the title as still available. Collectors tracking the Open Doors collaborations should note that this is the fifth in a defined sequence, one that now reads as a coherent survey of a generation’s early work.