Valerie Galloway’s first monograph, Rêver Dans le Désert, gathers thirty-two hand-colored and toned gelatin silver photographs that move between the Sonoran Desert and the remembered textures of French culture. Born in France and long resident in New York before settling in Tucson, Galloway has built a practice that includes painting and mixed media alongside photography; the book draws on that range without forcing it into a single register. The images are described as demonstrating a deliberately disparate set of manners — the observing eye associated with Eugène Atget, the unresolvable object-play of Man Ray, the drifting attention of the French New Wave — while paying homage to the Surrealists of the 1930s.
What distinguishes the collection is its handling of the print itself. The book reproduces the photographs on natural textured art paper. Their hand-coloring and toning, including immersion of prints in coffee, place the original images between photograph and drawing. The effect is not a uniform style but a series of registered moods: fleeting French references and enduring desert topographies held in the same sequence. The desert is not merely a backdrop; its forms and light are treated as material for reverie, and the title announces the book’s governing condition.
Nazraeli Press has bound the volume in coffee-colored silk boards with a contrasting linen spine, a design that echoes the tonal decisions inside. The book is published to coincide with solo exhibitions of Galloway’s work in Milan and Tokyo, placing the photographs in a public exhibition context at the moment of publication. Across forty-two pages, the sequence gives the disparate images room to converse rather than resolve.
For collectors, the interest lies in the coherence between subject, process, and object. Galloway’s willingness to let the Surrealist inheritance remain active — rather than simply cited — gives the volume a position within contemporary photographic practice that is specific and argued. This is a first monographic statement by an artist whose career has moved across media and cities; it rewards attention for its internal logic and its physical care.
