Three Photobooks Use Text as Structural Element, from Hannah Altman to Virginia McGee Richards

Three photobooks published between 2025 and 2026 treat text as a structural decision rather than a captioning device, according to a Lenscratch "Book Talk" feature. Hannah Altman's We Will Return to You (Saint Lucy Books, 2025) draws on Yiddish literature and places a fictional poetic prose fable at its center, creating a three-chapter structure that opens and closes with photographs; the text is printed in bronze ink with large letterforms on mottled parchment paper. Asiya Al. Sharabi's My Mother's Tender Script (Workshop Arts, 2026) stems from a found address book left by her mother, a Yemeni woman married at eleven, widowed at fifteen, and denied schooling so she never learned to read or write. Opening and closing texts frame conceptual images, while fragments in the mother's voice blend childlike handwriting with a monospaced typeface evoking typewriter journal pages. Virginia McGee Richards's The Inner Passage (MIT Press, 2026) traces a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals built largely by enslaved Black people for white plantation owners and their commerce, which paradoxically became an escape route to Spanish Florida. That research-driven project combines photographs, essays, interviews and detailed captions in personal and academic registers. Book documentation for the three titles is credited to The Book Photographer and Steven Paneccasio, with creative direction by Luminosity Lab.