Stick Holding Branch gathers photographs Wytske van Keulen made between 2009 and 2019 in the French Pyrenees, Japan, and the United States. Over that decade she returned, again and again, to individuals who had chosen to set aside a thoroughly economized and de-spiritualized world. What she photographs is not those people directly but the places they inhabit: rooms, outbuildings, landscapes that continue to hold the shape of a life while the life itself stays out of frame.

That decision governs the book. Because the inhabitants are absent, the pictures loosen their grip on the documentary and settle into the condition of images, released from a specific place and time. We read furnishings, light, and weather as evidence of intention rather than as reportage, and the series becomes a study of withdrawal as a positive choice rather than a retreat.

The photographs do not carry the argument alone. An extensive selection of correspondence and fragments of personal notes runs alongside them, giving the book a second register and a second voice. The result is an intimate portrait of a scattered community, one defined less by geography than by a shared refusal of society’s demanding expectations. The living environments and the written traces together describe a way of being that is deliberate, ongoing, and largely invisible.

Fw:Books published the volume in 2022 in a softcover edition of 750 copies, designed by Hans Gremmen: 152 pages, full color, 23 by 26 centimeters, with texts in English. For a collection built around contemporary photographic practice and its book forms, this is a considered example. The decade of returns behind it, the absence at its center, and the interplay between image and correspondence give it a coherence that rewards slow, repeated looking.