A reminder that the 15% pre-order discount on my upcoming Gingers of America book ends today, July 17th, at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Pre-ordering not only saves you money, it also ensures you receive first-edition copies of the book. And it really helps me make sure the cash flows to the right places at the right times.

Pre-Order NOW

Copies of the first edition of my previous Gingers book sold steadily, then all at once sold out. So, corny as it sounds, buy now to avoid disappointment and guarantee joy.

Please also feel free to spread the news about the book by sharing GingersofAmerica.com far and wide. If you post about it on social media, please use #gingersofamerica or tag me @kierandodds.

If you want to help further, please consider supporting me by purchasing an annual subscription to this Substack feed. (It’s the same cost as a reduced-price book, or about one nice coffee a month.)

Thank you as ever for all your support!

Kieran
GingersofAmerica.com

The book will be published in September 2026, and it goes to print soon. Support me by pre-ordering a copy and sharing this post! There is a pre-order discount until Friday, 17 July 2026. Get involved!

Browse the Book

1. Print

It sounds obvious, but to make a photobook you need photos. Physical, printed photos to make the book feel real as early as possible. I made a wide selection of portraits and adjusted levels so they were consistent. Then I made lots of cheap prints. I was able to pin these up on a wall, spread them out on a table, play with groupings and orderings and generally visualise how they would work together, far better than I ever could have done on a screen.

2. Observe

In photobooks, just as in the magazine pieces I have worked on over the years, a sequence of images tells a story. That narrative may be explicit or more subtle. My first Gingers book was a typology, composed solely of portraits, following a short introduction. Readers loved the images but said they were curious to learn more about the subjects all of whom I had interviewed. In Gingers of America, I decided to make the narratives more explicit, and to use the interviews. I asked people where the hair appears in their family and that generally brought up origin stories: everyone in America has at least one of them. Then we moved to discuss what unites the States today. That was equally interesting, and certain themes recurred.

3. Chapters

I decided to use these recurring themes to structure the book into chapters. Photo editor Marc Prüst, who has assisted on all my photobooks, helped me get a better sense of the shape of the whole book, and I then worked on the sequences within it.

4. Landscapes

At the start of each chapter, I decided to include landscape photos I had made while in the States. Landscape photography is my main style, tracing the way human culture shapes it physically but also how we view a landscape. So, it felt right to include this geographic context alongside the portraits. These landscapes link to the larger theme or the essay itself of each chapter but also connect across the whole book. You can view the landscapes as one sequence in themselves. The book oscillates between the big-picture flyover view of the USA at 30,000 feet, smaller landscape details, and a face-to-face street view. That seemed the right way to understand a nation; indeed a big inspiration for me was an extract by Samuel Johnson about the common life and how it can reveal the state of a nation. I open the book with this quotation, and it is epic.

5. Essays

I hide in cafes around Edinburgh to write. After days of reading and editing interview transcripts, I began gathering material into essays around each chapter’s theme. Each essay I wrote flows from a travelogue and weaves individual stories of the portrait-sitters together. Pulling off the use of this rare golden trait to weave together the story of the nation was very, very hard. I was aided massively by my book-editor friend Sarah Ream. Like Marc, she draws out what is there and helps it flow. Across all fields, good editors make the world a better place. The book also uses pull-out quotes to emphasise key people or ideas. Including them made sequencing even more of a challenge; the visuals had to flow, the narrative of the chapter had to connect with them, and the quotes had to fit. Another reason why sticking prints to a wall was so helpful. Pulling all of this together took a very long time: staring and swapping, until, like a jigsaw, it was finally solved.

6. Format

I made a mockup book early on to see how it would feel in my hand. I wanted a bigger book than Gingers; it is America after all, but also it is doing something more. So I wanted it to feel substantial but also readable, like the favourite photobooks I go back to time and again. A book to browse and enjoy over years, in which every page feels carefully crafted, because it is. This is also a stage when I began considering production costs, although I am often driven by artistic idealism initially.

Browse the Book

7. Concept

My designer Ed Watt is currently glowing after his studio, Need., was recently awarded Scottish Design Agency of the Year. Ed and I have worked on many good things over two decades (see picture above), and this felt like a milestone project. I say often that the divine is the detail, and that was definitely the case for this book. The design of the book really deserves a post of its own. We developed the idea of nodding towards a family tree, with name, state and year of birth for each portrait, as I had done with my previous Gingers book. We wanted to keep the layout spacious, like a monograph, in the portrait sections. The other major motif was a thread of golden hair connecting people, and this idea flowed into the font design. The long lines work as American flag stripes too, but I wanted a light touch here, as the book is as much a global as a national story. The flag-shaped barcode on the back cover is a favourite detail, though.

8. Materials

The narrative ideas are the skeleton of a book, the visual content makes up the body, and then we get to dress it in paper or cloth. I am always tempted when I see a nice cover-cloth sample, but I wanted to see how the interior of the book shaped up first. The book may appear to be about a certain colour, but that did not necessarily mean that that colour should be on the cover. That said, I ended up choosing a fabric close to that of the orangey Gingers. The use of a tip-in portrait also affects the color perception, so we opted for a slightly less vibrant tone to let the inset portrait pop out. As we are printing in the United States rather than the Netherlands (as for my previous books), I have had to choose a different paper to my usual Fedrigoni. Each book brings its production challenges, but having found a trustworthy guide in the States, I am working through it with them.

9. Trials and Errors

Printing books is an extreme sport for the independent artist. A lot of money is on the line, and a book feels like a momentous work of art. I fuss over details people will maybe never notice. Those who have worked on it know that, and thankfully they are obsessed about their work too. In the end, it has always come good. I always get wet proofs (printed sheets of the book) to test the look, feel, and colours.

10. Pre-order

Once everything is done, months have passed. I am wearier and greyer, and it is over to you, the audience, to grab a copy early with the generous pre-order discount. The first hardback Gingers book sold out on the pre-order and we had to print even more paperback versions. I always try to tell people to get it now, not just so I have cash in the coffers to pay the printing bill (though this is hugely helpful), but because subsequent editions of the book may not be quite the same in the future. Order one while you can, and check out the gorgeous special edition with a contrasting slip cover.

The pre-order discount ends 17 July 2026. That’s only a week today!

Browse the Book

Today, you can pre-order a first-edition copy that will be mailed to your home as soon as it is released in the fall of 2026. I hope the book will magnify the golden light of this great nation.

Pre-Order Now

If all gingers in America moved to the same place, there’d be a city of roughly 14 million redheads. Imagine how bright Ginger Town would look from space. But there is no geographic hot-spot for gingers in the United States that I am aware of. Rather, they are sprinkled like gold dust across the whole country, each a glittering glimpse of intersecting life histories that span the planet.

Today, I am delighted to finally announce the publication of a new photobook of these golden people – even bigger and, I think, better than the original. Created over the past two years, and starting with the question of what unites the States today, Gingers of America looks beyond the media headlines of division to celebrate the common life through a diverse cast of awesome humans.

Almost everyone featured in the book is ginger, but it is not really about hair. Gingers of America is structured around themes raised time and again in the conversations I had with portrait sitters about origins, land, migration, power, dreams, and unity.

The portraits reveal national and global connections, reminding us of our shared stories and the genetic histories written in every cell of our bodies.

We, the people, are all made of the same substance—and sometimes it shows.

About the book

The cloth-bound hardback book is proudly printed and bound in the USA. It is 248 pages long, with landscape photographs, short essays and 78 portraits, whittled down from thousands of ginger applicants.

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I was sad to say goodbye to one of my favourite photo-weaves last week but also very happy it has been collected by a good person who understands that landscapes are accumulations of both soil and story.

When people think of Scotland, they generally imagine hills, deer and rivers, but also textiles: tartan and tweed. Since the country was rebranded in t…

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Knowing that red hair is a recessive gene, I did not think, with my Native American roots and their dad’s African American roots, that Jaxston would be born with red hair. But he was.

I was told that his hair would change once he got older, but I knew that wasn’t the case, because when he was born, his eye…

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Los Angeles is a grid of neighbourhoods, connected and disconnected by roads.

Writer Dorothy Parker once described LA as “72 suburbs in search of a city”. Rapper Ice-T said the city is “a microcosm of the United States. If LA falls, the country falls.” Personally, I find cultural theorist Christian Gonzalez Ho’s description to be the most helpful. He see…

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When I first read Judith Herrin’s book Byzantium, I felt a longing, a kind of homesickness for a place I had not been. What Germans would call Sehnsucht. Then, standing with Judith in churches in Ravenna, Italy, I experienced the Byzantine Empire for the first time.

Ravenna was once the seat of the Byzantine government in what is now Italy (the Western Roman Empire), and in the sixth century its bishops began building churches. Some of these incredible buildings, including the Basilica of San Vitale (above) and the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, remain, and offer a direct experience of the glorious architecture and decorative arts of the empire. Go to Ravenna before you die, I beg you.

This week, I once again experienced profound beauty in a 21st-century portal to Byzantium found in an unexpected place – Southern California.

Cavalry Chapel is on the campus of a modern evangelical university, Biola, and was transformed in 2018 by two of Denmark’s greatest artists, Maja Lisa Englehardt and the late Peter Brandes. Inside is Englehardt’s incredible relief wall of the Resurrection, a golden grid made by hand-carving five tons of clay, casting them in plaster and overlaying the plaster with gold.

So great is this wall of gold that the late Byzantine scholar Alexei Lidov, I am reliably informed, sat quietly in front of it for an hour, before announcing- Byzantium had come to the 21st century!

Inserted into the thin gaps between sections are prayers from students, a spontaneous gesture, the impact of which grows each semester.

I knelt before the wall: I am a photographer, and we contort ourselves for the best pictures. To photograph such beauty is both simple and difficult. Simple in that the main subject is obvious. The difficulty comes in trying to capture the experience of how the photographer feels experiencing it.

The turning point was the moment I switched off the lights and let the slotted side windows (covered in Brandes’s stunning stained glass) cast Californian sunset light across its surface. I was no longer in La Mirada but transported to Ravenna, where I had spent sunrise and sunset in churches, waiting for the mosaics to come alive.

Photographers salivate over the golden hour, the two hours after sunrise and before sunset when light and life feels more present. I call it eternal light. Something special happens in that light that transcends time and space. Yet I remain there: it’s as if I am more there, in fact. Awakened into that moment.

I do not believe any space on earth is more sacred than other, but some places, like Ravenna, like the Cavalry Chapel, seem better than others at offering a portal to another dimension, one separate to space and time, and perhaps outside of everything entirely bathed in that light of all light.

Weather updates first

Scotland is very cold and wet at the moment. I had not seen a day of sunshine for weeks, and that is not hyperbole. No, it’s not Arctic cold or monsoon wet: it’s worse! Ask people from across the world who live here, and they’ll agree it’s a special kind of cold. A chill-to-the-bone dampness that makes you want to fell the majestic …

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(For a more in-depth interview with me about my career, have a listen to the most recent Exhibiting Faith podca…

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Today is Blue Monday, the saddest day of the year, a day invented by marketeers to comfort us with discount codes. But I feel there may is only one true consolation to the post-festive slump: fluffy animals in cute coats.

I was in New York City recently to discuss lofty ideas of heaven being revealed in art. But considering the heavenly seemed to make me feel more earth-y. Maybe there was something in the cold city air: the scent of a hot dog or the whiff of a shaggy tail. In any case, something lit up in my brain. The result is this little photo essay, Warm Dogs.

Elliot Erwitt’s photographic series Dogs lives rent-free in my head. For years it has made me laugh, especially the iconic image of a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, shot from street level. Only now did I actually discover it was a set-up for an advertising campaign: he hired the dogs and positioned them! Yet the photograph is still great, and it inspired my wandering around Central Park over a few days between visits to the Met galleries and the MoMA store.

One day, I met Elizabeth and Blossom sitting happily on a bench as the sun rose over an icy pond. “This is a dream come true,” she said. She once lived as an American abroad in London and Paris. Now she was in the other great city, New York. Just for a few months, to complete the set.

A little later, Lola’s starlet quality shone out on the sidewalk. She was tiny but with an aura that made people swerve mid-step. “She sticks her tongue out when she smiles,” I was told, and on cue she smiled like a pro.

I watched a corgi being carried like an empress to a secluded part of the park to, you know, do what one must do. A couple of Japanese Chins peeked out of a bag as their human chauffeur loaded them into her car. “They’re rare,” she beamed proudly.

There are 600,000 dogs in New York City. More than humans in Edinburgh, where I live. Imagine a city of dogs. Not a post-apocalyptic city where packs roam the ruins, gnashing at the limbs of the survivors. Rather, a city of softly groomed, vaccinated, puffer-jacketed rare breeds snuffling up to your ankles. As they distract you with their cuteness, the owners kneel and sweep the tarmac with inverted plastic bags. They rise and, like master illusionists, make the packages vanish. Poop, no poop.

Well, I hope that cheered you. Here’s to brighter days.

The full set of photos is available through Panos Pictures, or contact me directly.

Please share the article with anyone in need of some light to their inbox this week. Now We See provides a weekly dose of light through visual stories of landscapes or gingers or heavenly cities or even warm dogs.

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This weirdly tall panorama photograph was beamed from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it humble-bragged its interplanetary exploits. Look, earthlings! I made tyre tracks on Mars! The tonal depth and resolution seem so familiar that the image resembles an iPhone snap.

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The Roman Empire faltered at Falkirk. Either the Romans recognised their limits or admitted the barren Highlands weren’t worth conquering. The final frontier runs not along Hadrian’s famous wall (begun in 122 AD) but sixty miles north at the 40-mile-long Antonine Wall (begun in 142AD). A few forward camps and ‘Glen-blocker’ forts are found at the distan…

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