Setanta presents Collecting Hands, the second photobook from one of street photography’s rising stars, Monaris.
The Puerto Rican-born, New Jersey-based photographer has quickly developed a reputation as one of the most exciting of the new generation of street photographers, captivating viewers with her cinematic streetscapes where fleeting urban moments are rendered with painterly care and atmospheric intensity.
Known for capturing the essence of everyday life—commuters on the subway, stoops alive with conversation, or quiet gestures of passersby—her work balances observation with imagination, turning the ordinary into something quietly extraordinary. Her signature approach, informed by the likes of Fred Herzog, Saul Leiter, and Vivian Maier, combines careful framing, reflections, shadows, and subtle post-production color grading to breathe life into each image, allowing viewers to enter her visual world one frame at a time.
Following her acclaimed debut Mementos, which traced the ephemeral poetry of daily life, her latest photobook, Collecting Hands, turns to a singular, intimate detail: the human hand.
Where her previous work found drama and meaning in broader street scenes, this new volume focuses on fragments of life, hands holding, working, resting, or performing small gestures that reveal character, history, and emotion. Hands have long been a subject of fascination for artists, writers, and psychologists alike, seen as instruments of action, mirrors of identity, and vessels of expression. They can convey age, labor, intimacy, secrecy, or resilience, offering a language all their own.
In this new volume, Monaris isolates these gestures with meticulous care, revealing the poetry within small, everyday details. As Dave Krugman observes in the accompanying text, “Each image here is a thread in a wider tapestry… our hands hold our humanity.” Her lens transforms these seemingly minor moments into profound visual statements, inviting reflection on the stories and lives encoded in each hand.
Monaris’ mastery lies in her ability to render the ordinary extraordinary. Her debut photobook demonstrated this by transforming street scenes into cinematic compositions that feel like a single frame from a larger story. In Collecting Hands, this ability to intrigue remains, but the focus has shifted. The tight framing, revealing only this small part of the body and often captured from behind, leaves the viewer asking more. We see hands set against vibrant and intricate textiles, such as the deep red of a floral skirt or the complex patterns of a traditional gown, contrasted against the starker textures of work and life found in a white laboratory apron or the heavy tan fabric of a trench coat.
There is a profound beauty in the utility of the everyday captured here; fingers curl around the soft cylinder of a paper roll, the rigid handle of a metal lunchbox, a small inhaler, or the thin plastic of a shopping bag. These images leave us wondering about the destination and identity of the subjects, as the face remains hidden and the narrative is carried entirely by the tension of a grip and the objects being held.
Collecting Hands is both a study and a celebration of detail, pattern, and the human touch. It is a book that rewards repeated viewing, revealing new subtleties with each encounter and confirming Monaris’ place as a photographer capable of turning the smallest gestures into enduring, deeply affecting art.
Discover more of Monaris’ work in our Interview/profile here.
All images © Monaris