Charlie Hay’s No One Left to Blame approaches suicide through the places left behind. Following the death of a close friend, the artist began a long investigation that led to photographs of locations in different parts of the world where people had died by suicide. The images avoid depicting the act itself. Instead, the reader encounters landscapes and built environments whose ordinary appearance cannot explain the lives and losses associated with them.

That gap between what a photograph shows and what the reader knows gives the project its force. A view can describe a location while leaving its history largely inaccessible. Hay uses this limitation to sustain questions rather than to promise a single explanation. The approach is consistent with his broader socially engaged practice and his involvement in Uncertain States Scandinavia, a platform for lens-based art. Here, however, public discussion begins in personal grief: the book makes space for a subject often surrounded by stigma and silence.

Published by La Maison de Z in November 2024, the 108-page paperback makes restraint a material choice. Ma Shirui’s design, with art direction by Zhen Shi, uses two-colour printing with metallic inks on coloured paper. The modest 13 × 21 cm format, embossed and foil-stamped cover and hollow spine give the images a deliberately intimate setting. In the publisher’s spreads, pictures sometimes occupy only part of a page, leaving the surrounding paper to participate in the rhythm of reading.

The book received the Swedish Photobook Prize in 2026, when the jury recognised the relationship between its difficult subject and its careful photographic and physical treatment. For collectors interested in how books convey absence, its importance lies in that relationship. Neither the landscape nor the design supplies a resolution; together they ask the reader to remain with uncertainty. It is a work whose quiet pacing and material decisions contribute directly to the ethical problem of representing loss.