In the mid-1990s, Jeff Dunas traveled the Blues Highway portion of US Route 61, from New Orleans north through Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, past the western tip of Tennessee and into Missouri, to photograph musicians whose work had shaped the region’s musical identity. Those sessions fed his portfolio and monograph State of the Blues. For his contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, Dunas returned to that route, gathering landscapes and portraits alongside texts describing what he saw and why the subject still matters.

The book’s title names two coordinates: the highway and Honeyboy Edwards, the blues guitarist and singer whose long life linked the Delta to Chicago. The route itself carries a specific cultural weight. At the junction of US 61 and US 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sits the crossroads where, by legend, Robert Johnson traded his soul for mastery of the blues guitar. Dunas photographs a landscape dense with that mythology while keeping his attention on the people who made the music.

Issued by Nazraeli Press in a hardcover volume of 16 pages with 11 duotone plates, the book extends the series’ interest in compact, carefully paced sequences. Pairing open road and portrait, and setting images beside his own written account, Dunas treats Highway 61 as both a place and a history. The landscape passages establish the terrain the music came from; the portraits record the figures who carried it forward.

Highway 61 to Honeyboy belongs to a limited run of 500 numbered copies, each including a 5 x 7 inch print signed by the artist. The combination of a modest page count, an original signed photograph, and a body of work with deep roots in American vernacular music gives the book its interest: it is less a retrospective than a compact return to a journey Dunas had already made once, and a chance to see what the road looked like when he went back.