One Picture Book Two #21: Africa: Gems and Jewels is a hardcover from Nazraeli Press: sixteen pages, eighteen four-color plates, and one original signed photograph accompanying each copy. Carrie Mae Weems is the photographer. The title belongs to One Picture Book Two, the Nazraeli series devoted to single projects, and its compact extent is part of how the work is framed.

The project has its origins in a decision Weems describes from the early 1990s. After photographing across the Sea Islands along the southeastern coast of the United States, she decided it was time to go home, back to Africa, because there was something she needed to know about the nature of herself. She writes of her love for customs, beliefs, and material culture, and notes that she made many pictures there but portraits of only a handful of people. Those portraits are what the book gathers. The title, Africa: Gems and Jewels, sets faces where precious stones might be expected.

Weems’s broader practice has addressed race, family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power, and her work is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Whitney. That context matters less for what it says about the artist than for the contrast it draws with this book’s specific evidence: a handful of portraits, made in a particular place at a particular moment, and assembled in a volume that gives them a defined and finite shape.

For collectors, the book’s significance is concrete. The publisher states that the edition is limited to 500 numbered copies, and that each includes a 5×7 inch original print signed by the artist. Combined with the four-color plates and the small format, this makes the title both a record of the project and a vehicle for an original photograph. Its interest lies in that combination, in a volume conceived to hold a single sustained body of work rather than a survey.