Ann Hamilton has long used photography inside larger installation works, but rarely as the organizing subject of a book. Sense gathers vocabulary from four bodies of image-based work made over five years, and Radius Books gives it the form of an object rather than a record. The volume is announced as art and text by Hamilton, which matters: this is not a survey of a career but a single artist’s construction, printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs and understood by its publisher as book art.

The images run in two directions at once. There are photographic portraits, and there are lens-less contact scans of ornithological taxidermy, fabrics and garments, and objects drawn from personal and institutional collections. Reprocessed through multiple printings on tissue Gampi and newsprint, they insist on the substrate they sit on. Shallow depths of field, repetition, and scale shifts give the sequence a cadence closer to film than to a catalogue, and the book’s own tactile surface completes the argument. Hamilton’s stated concern is tactility, and the possibility of cultivating attention in a hyper-distracted information economy; the pages enact that concern instead of describing it.

Collectors of artists’ books will recognize the type. Sense sits where photographic monograph, collage and printed matter overlap, and it is best read as an artwork in hand. The evidence does not support claims about scarcity, edition size or critical reception, and none are needed. What is documented is the method: contact scans, tissue and newsprint, multiple printings, and a sequence built from intuitive connections among four separate bodies of work. Those choices are the reason the volume rewards returning to it.

This is Hamilton’s project in the fullest sense, with photography credited throughout the publication. For a collection that treats the photobook as a medium rather than a container, Sense offers a considered example of an artist using print to think about touch, light and surface.