One Picture Book #68: Cy’s Rollei is a small hardcover from Nazraeli Press: sixteen pages, twelve four-color plates, and one original print. Its premise is as modest as its trim size. On September 13, 2008, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, a well-known artist and collector bought a dusty Rolleiflex at a yard sale and asked three photographers to find out whether it still worked. The photographs were made in sequence on a single roll of film, so the book records a shared test rather than a retrospective selection. The camera’s doubtful condition is not background; it is the reason the pictures exist.

The photographers are Sally Mann, Rob McDonald, and Even Rogers, and the included original print is signed by Rob McDonald. Three hands working through one roll gives the sequence its particular texture: continuity without a single controlling author, an impromptu investigation conducted in company. The colophon anchors the whole enterprise to a day and a place, and that precision matters. This is not a survey of a career or a themed portfolio but the trace of a specific afternoon, preserved exposure by exposure.

Nazraeli’s One Picture Book format suits such material. The scale is intimate, the sequence is short, and the print that accompanies the volume returns the reader to the physical circumstances of the original experiment. The book asks to be handled and read through in one sitting, which is roughly the duration of a roll of film. That correspondence between the object and the event it documents is the volume’s real subject.

For a collector, the appeal lies in this convergence of format, collaboration, and circumstance, not in any claim about the market. A camera bought on a whim, three photographers, one roll, and a publisher willing to treat the episode as a book: the result is a concise document of process and sociability, and an unusual entry within a series defined by its economy. Its interest is the specificity of the encounter and the care with which the book frames it.