In a small town in Romania, a factory closed in 2019 and left behind more than a hundred selfmade chairs. They had been made by hand, station by station, each one adjusted to the body and task of a particular worker. Alin Cinca photographed them where they stood, in their original setting, which no longer exists. The publisher describes the chairs as objects of brutal beauty, a personalised way of support and rest, made from raw materials and shaped by functional improvisation and the passing of time.

The chairs are not presented as design objects or as relics. They are shown as evidence of labor, shaped by use and by the limits of available material. Differences of material and proportion invite comparison across the sequence, making functional improvisation and the traces of use central to the reading of these ordinary objects. Read in sequence, the photographs trace a kind of vernacular typology, each variation answering a different job or a different body. The book’s approach is patient and frontal, allowing the objects to hold the page without nostalgia.

This is a collaboration between photographer Alin Cinca and writer Costin Popescu, with a text by Popescu. The combination matters: the essay gives the images a historical and social frame, while the sequence treats the photographs as a considered whole rather than a catalogue of curiosities. At 96 pages and 20 by 28 centimeters, the paperback is compact enough to read as an argument and generous enough to let the chairs register as singular forms.

For readers drawn to photography that examines work, material culture, and the aftermath of industry, this book offers a focused body of images with a clear reason to exist. Its subject is specific, its method is consistent, and its attention to the ordinary is deliberate. It asks the viewer to look closely at things that were never meant to be looked at, and it does so without sentimentality.