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Following his widely reviewed book California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks (Merrell, 2019), Amir Zaki has created a sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit. The book is a double gatefold, having three spines, which opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches. The erstwhile skateboarder brings multiple series into focus for this book, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and hyper-realist California beach architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily quiet and devoid of people.

An interview with curator and arts writer Corrina Peipon brings Zaki's history and concerns about photography and technology to the fore. "I am interested in the attraction and repulsion that a photograph which depicts something familiar and unfamiliar, initially welcoming yet somewhat alienating, can elicit in a viewer and me. I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace. Ultimately, I use digital technology as a means to an end. I am trying to make photographs that manifest the world I desire."

From the essay by literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton, we gain insight into Zaki's manipulation of space through evenness, which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: "The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight." Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki's insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an "addition through subtraction" of the third-dimension.

Zaki has been interviewed for NPR online and featured or interviewed in Dezeen, Wallpaper, The New Order, Elle Decor, Hypebeast, GUP Magazine, and Aramco World. His last book, California Concrete is in the top 50 in Skateboarding books and top 150 in Individual Photographer books on Amazon.