In March 1992, Alec Soth and his then-partner Rachel drove from Minnesota to Memphis with their German shepherd, Tasha. Soth’s contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series recounts that trip in a brief opening note and twelve images, eleven reproductions and one original photograph, all previously unpublished. The sequence does not present the Mississippi as a grand subject already mastered; it records a journey before Soth’s later, more widely known work along the river, when the camera is still a traveling companion rather than an instrument of survey.

The book belongs to a publisher’s series defined by its small scale: hardcover, sixteen pages, with a single original print bound in. That structure matters. It makes the volume an object to be held and read in one sitting, and it places a private, early episode within a collecting format rather than a retrospective monograph. The photographs carry the excitement of departure and the ordinariness of the road, with the couple and their dog as participants rather than distant observers.

For collectors, the volume’s interest lies in its position within Soth’s development and in the series format itself. The original print is integral to the edition, not an afterthought, and the unpublished status of the images gives the book the character of a sketchbook made public. It documents a journey that precedes the celebrated river work, and it does so in a compressed form that rewards attention to sequencing and to the relation between the note and the photographs.

Read alongside Soth’s later Mississippi photographs, this small book offers a different register: personal, provisional, and close to the experience of travel. It is a precise example of how a photobook can hold an early moment without inflating it, and of how a publisher’s series can give such material a durable form.