There's a particular kind of shot that's a gift, in theory at least, to photographers. The lone building, boarded up and improbable, standing on its own with nothing else around it. Dramatic irony and geometric symmetry in equal measure.
Ben Marcin's been shooting this kind of scene for the best part of two decades. And his debut photobook, The Holdouts, published by GOST on 1 August, is a great example of what elevates a good idea to a good body of work.
The premise is simple. Marcin, a photographer based in Baltimore, Maryland, has spent almost 40 years photographing the places people live, and for the last 20 or so he's trained that attention on his own city and its hinterland.
The Holdouts brings together three projects he originally shot as separate bodies of work: solo row houses in Baltimore that survived demolition around them, abandoned farmhouses on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and homeless encampments that rarely last more than a year. It's only recently, he says, that he worked out the thread connecting them.
That thread is spelled out by the title. A holdout is a real estate term for an owner who refuses to sell to a developer, forcing a project to be built around their property or eminent domain to be invoked against them.
Actually, Marcin concedes, almost none of his subjects are holdouts in that strict sense; no shopping centre or highway ever displaced the people who once lived in these houses. But the looser meaning – the act of resisting or refusing to accept what's on offer – fits these pictures rather well.
Buildings as portraiture
What's most interesting to me isn't the premise so much as the discipline of it. Marcin isn't chasing novelty; he's applying the same visual treatment to building after building, for years. Always a single structure shot dead-on and centred, and letting small variations in light, decay and context do the storytelling.
It's the kind of repetition that separates a typology (a series of photographs that all use the same formal approach) from a collection of snapshots.
Editing masterclasss
It also means the book rewards close looking rather than a quick flick-through. A shuttered row house in Baltimore, an abandoned farmhouse in Worcester County, and a tarpaulin shelter strung with an American flag and a Ravens banner... These are all, formally, the same kind of picture: a solitary structure, centred, facing the camera, with nothing to distract from it. But look closer, and the differences in detail are utterly compelling.
The editing story behind this project is also a fascinating one. Marcin shot these three strands independently – without any plan to unify them – across roughly 15 years and locations spanning Baltimore, Philadelphia, Camden and the Eastern Shore counties of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. It was only in hindsight, with the help of his publisher, that a coherent book emerged from what had been three separate filing cabinets of work.
That's worth knowing, if you're the sort of photographer who feels obliged to know your project's thesis before you've finished shooting it. Because the lesson of The Holdouts is that sometimes, the unifying idea only becomes visible once there's enough material to see a pattern. And a long-term project doesn't need a name on day one to earn its place in a book further on down the line.
The Holdouts is published by GOST Books on 1 August 2026, hardback, 144pp, $65/£50/€55.
