Jasper brings together Matthew Genitempo’s photographs of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas and Missouri. Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor Frank Stanford, the project follows homes and men living in solitude. Fog, woodland and inhabited interiors form the setting for an exploration of withdrawal from everyday society. The landscape is therefore more than a location: it is part of how the photographs approach the desire to live apart.

The publisher describes the work as moving between fact and fiction. This suggests a way of reading the photographs without treating them either as a complete social account or as pure invention. A home can be a material place and an image of retreat; a wooded landscape can be observed terrain and a setting for imagined escape. Genitempo’s project holds these possibilities together, asking how the reality of solitude meets the stories that gather around it.

The September 2018 Twin Palms edition is a clothbound hardcover with a dust jacket. It contains 96 pages and 51 tritone plates printed on uncoated paper, in a ten-and-a-half-by-thirteen-inch format. These details give the photographs a defined physical setting, in which repeated looking can move between the figures, rooms and surrounding land. The book’s scale allows the project to be encountered through a succession of images rather than reduced to a single emblem of isolation.

For readers interested in photographs of place, Jasper offers an approach organized around a question about living. What does it mean to withdraw, and how far can a person actually separate from society? The pictures need not answer those questions conclusively. Their relationship to Stanford and to the Ozarks gives the inquiry a particular context, while the tension between observation and imagination remains open to the reader.