The State of Water brings together Brad Temkin’s photographs of the structures and processes by which wastewater and storm water are reclaimed, treated, and returned to use. More than 700 cities recycle such water through combined sewer systems, for agriculture and even drinking water, and it is the visual residue of this cycle—sludge, salt, chemical separation, the architecture built to manage it—that draws his attention. Temkin is not documenting infrastructure to explain it. He is after the strangeness of the forms and the distorted sense of scale, an approach that moves past description toward an abstract, at times surreal landscape.

The book, published by Radius Books, is substantial in body and sequence: 148 pages, 70 images, hardcover, at 13 by 10 inches. A conversation with Anne Wilkes Tucker accompanies the photographs, giving the pictures a discursive frame rather than leaving them to stand alone. The proportions and weight of the volume were noted for suggesting the monumental infrastructure the images depict, which is a useful way to understand the object: it behaves like the systems it surveys, holding large structures in a considered order.

Temkin’s subject is not untouched nature but the engineered middle of the water cycle, the places where purification and reuse happen. His interest lies less in whether a given structure is pure or waste, or what it is used for, than in how it looks and what it does to the eye. The photographs thus sit between landscape and abstraction, and the book’s design and pacing support that ambiguity.

For a collector, the case rests on the work and the book form rather than on scarcity or market talk. Temkin’s long engagement with the human-altered landscape is well established, and The State of Water extends that concern to a subject few photographers treat with this level of visual ambition. The collaboration with a noted curator and the care of the Radius Books edition make it a coherent addition to a shelf of contemporary landscape photography.