Thinking About Photography
Dedicated to expanding our ideas about photography
Immaterial Books
© Immaterial Books
Toward Photographic Thinking
Immaterial Books is dedicated to publishing photo-media-based works that challenge the boundaries between image, text, and theory. We see a growing need for books that resist classification—projects that inhabit the space between visual culture, social theory, and experimental documentary. We publish works that are not only visually compelling but also intellectually rigorous as a medium of critical inquiry.
What draws us to a project is often a certain ambiguity. We look for works that are neither purely documentary nor purely aesthetic but instead inhabit the space between—a kind of quiet tension that invites re-viewing/reading.
Design plays a central role in this: each book is approached as a unique object, with form emerging from the logic of the work itself rather than from a fixed house style.
We are also deeply engaged with our local community in Champaign, Illinois. Immaterial Books, via an offshoot, the Immaterial Galley, curates exhibitions, hosts launch events and readings, and supports new work through open calls and artist collaborations. Our programming fosters spaces for public encounters, critical conversations, and the discovery of emerging voices.
An archive of recent and upcoming events can be found at immaterialbooks.com/events.
Also, we host a podcast series: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/voices. Here is an episode on our approach.
Recent Publications
The Thread of Water (Julie Patarin-Jossec) is a meditation on subaquatic trauma and postcolonial politics in the Mediterranean Sea. Blending analog photography, thermal imagery, poetry, and field notes, the book traces bodies and objects in liminal waterscapes—spaces of loss, but also of queer liberation. At once personal and political, it navigates the affective undercurrents of depth and dispossession. The Thread of Water is part of our Fast Theory series, which responds to the evolving intersections of photo media with technology, politics, and social change. Designed to be concise and accessible, Fast Theory titles foster broad engagement among diverse audiences—academic, artistic, and general. The series thrives on experimentation and critique, embracing impermanence and failure as essential to theory-making. It offers a nimble conceptual toolkit for rethinking visual culture through speed, adaptability, and responsiveness.
A Desert Transect (Brian O’Neill) explores the fragmented edges of urban development in Phoenix, Arizona—a city without a center. Through a hybrid method of photography, autoethnography, sound, and film, O’Neill examines the layered materialities and contested infrastructures of desert urbanism. This is the second in his Transects series, which probes the shifting intersections of ecology, industry, and everyday life. The book is both a visual inquiry and a sociological proposition—offering an alternative format for presenting critical, practice-led research
Machine Learning (Phillip Kalantzis Cope) interrogates the aesthetics and authorship of artificial intelligence. Feeding original photographs into early generative models like DALL·E, the project constructs algorithmically hallucinated interpretations of industrial and rural landscapes. These synthetic reimaginings unsettle the viewer’s relationship to photographic realism and provoke questions around creative agency in an age of machine vision. The result is an eerie and reflective engagement with the ethics and poetics of computational image-making.
Bins, Bales & Batteries (Nathan Pearce) is a quiet, attentive portrait of rural southern Illinois. Through modest, repetitive compositions—grain bins, baseball fields, churches, tank batteries—Pearce constructs a deeply personal archive of place. Inspired by the conceptual rigor of Ed Ruscha but grounded in regional intimacy, the work documents the rhythms and textures of everyday life. This publication stems from our Fields of Vision exhibition, which asked: What frames our photographic understanding of Central Illinois? How do agricultural rhythms, regional memory, or past documentary paradigms—from the Regionalist movement to WPA-era imagery—continue to shape how this landscape is represented? Bins, Bales & Batteries speaks from the “inside out,” disrupting voyeuristic tropes with a local voice grounded in lived experience, raising broader questions about who gets to picture place and how.
Above all, we see the photobook as a space for reimagining how visual culture is produced, circulated, and read. We’ve sought to create a place that supports artists working between traditions—between photography and philosophy, between material history and conceptual experimentation.
All images are @ Immaterial Books and the featured artist.