Leon Borensztein’s contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series is a hardcover volume of sixteen pages: thirteen duotone plates and one original photograph. The plates take up subjects from his earlier monograph, American Portraits 1979-1989, and the publisher characterizes them as variations on some of his most striking sitters, giving greater depth to that original publication. The book is not a survey. It is a return, made at book scale, to faces the photographer had already committed to print.

The One Picture Book format is deliberately narrow, and the constraint shapes what the volume can do. Thirteen plates cannot cover a career; they can hold a handful of faces and ask the viewer to look closely at each and at how one follows another. Because the publisher frames the images as variations, the interest lies partly in comparison — in what changes when a photographer reworks subjects he has already published, and what a shorter sequence does to their weight.

At the back is a signed original print of the cover image from American Portraits 1979-1989. The publisher treats this as the series’ signature gesture, and here it takes on a specific meaning: the print reproduces the image that introduced the earlier book, so the reader holds both the reproduction and the original in the same object. The publisher’s language of variation and greater depth describes a photographer working back into his own material, and the physical print alongside thirteen printed plates makes that return tangible.

For a collector, the book reads as a Borensztein title and as an entry in a well-defined series. What distinguishes it is the specificity of its relationship to American Portraits 1979-1989 and the presence of a signed print tied to that book’s cover — a relationship the publisher itself sets out, rather than the format alone. That is where the volume’s place is won.