Late in his career, Jeff Mermelstein turned the camera away from the street corner and toward the flower. The project began with more than two hundred flower images and developed into a book combining flower photographs with pages from old journals, family snapshots, iPhone notes, and previously unpublished prints culled from his own archive. The gathered material retains a spontaneous, unfinished character, sequenced without a hierarchy or a single narrative line, as if tipped loose from a shoebox.

The title comes from a comparison made during the book’s making: Mermelstein’s compulsion to photograph flowers resembled a butterfly’s habit, moving quickly and erratically from one attractive thing to the next. That analogy extends to street photographers themselves, who land, observe, and leave. Readers who know his fast, sharp work in New York will find a different register here: introspective, quiet, but still alert. Design and edit are by João Linneu and Myrto Steirou, published by Void in a screenprinted hardcover.

Void published the standard edition in a screenprinted hardcover measuring 16.8 by 23 centimetres. The surfaces and proportions give a consistent physical frame to material that moves between different moments and media. Within that frame, unexpected pairings of colour, form and composition invite the reader to make connections without being handed a chronological autobiography. The book was one of ten equal winners of the Fotobus Library Award in 2026.

For collectors familiar with Sidewalk, Arena or #nyc, the book offers a way to reconsider Mermelstein’s attention to fleeting encounters through his private archive. The quick movement associated with his street pictures survives, but its field now includes family memory, notes and objects kept over time. Its interest lies in this exchange between outward observation and inward recollection: the archive becomes an active photographic resource, rather than a retrospective storehouse.