Albert Watson. Kaos. 2nd Edition. Art Edition No. 101–150, 'Christy Turlington (Smoke), New York City', 1990

When Kaos first appeared in 2001, it made a quiet argument that a single photographer's range could be the whole subject of a book, not a liability to apologize for. Albert Watson had already spent thirty years refusing to specialize: fashion, celebrity, still life, landscape, reportage, all held to the same exacting finish. Most photographers narrow as they age; he simply added rooms to the house. This TASCHEN edition keeps that argument intact and hands it the weight of a career that only widened afterward.

The print that names this collector run is the anchor image for the whole method: Christy Turlington in profile, New York City, 1990, a ribbon of exhaled smoke drawn across the frame like a line ruled by hand. Nothing about it is loud. The elegance comes from control, from the graphic certainty of exactly where the smoke, the jaw, and the light are allowed to sit. The smoke had to be timed to the breath and the exposure to the smoke, none of it fakeable after the fact. That is the signature of the whole book: difficulty made to look like nothing.

That certainty has an unusual source. Watson sees the world flat. Blind in one eye since birth, he works without stereo depth, and he has long said the world already arrives to him as a two-dimensional design, which is precisely what a photograph is. The pictures bear it out, graphic before they are anything else, arranged like a poster the instant before each one becomes a portrait.

The range on display would embarrass most careers. The 1973 shot of Alfred Hitchcock gripping a plucked goose, Steve Jobs staring the lens down with a hand to his chin, Mike Tyson reduced to sculpture, Kate Moss in Marrakech, a leather-clad dominatrix in a Las Vegas motel, still lifes lit like reliquaries: the subjects have nothing in common except the hand that shaped them. The companion editions push the same point, one built around a chimpanzee holding a revolver, another around a Las Vegas performer named Breaunna. The joke of the range is that it never reads as restlessness. It reads as one temperament applied without prejudice to whatever is placed in front of it.

The working method sits underneath all of it. Watson shoots much of this on large-format film, a slow, deliberate camera that rewards planning and punishes the careless, and the discipline shows in how resolved even the throwaway frames feel. That missing eye becomes a compositional gift here, every scene pre-sorted into foreground shapes and flat background tone before the shutter ever moves. The famous 1984 portrait of Steve Jobs, chin on knuckles, eyes drilling the lens, was reportedly made in a handful of minutes, yet it carries the finish of something labored over for hours. Speed, in his hands, is what preparation buys.

Kaos gives real room to the obsessive series as much as the single icons. The Las Vegas pictures gather years of trips into one seedy, luminous world of showgirls, gamblers, and motel corridors; the Morocco work turns a location shoot into a body of images with its own weather and light. The Vegas series in particular reads like a novel told in stills, sequential, atmospheric, cumulative. Watson does not treat commercial assignments as a lesser tier than personal work, and a Vogue cover and a private series are edited into the same book at the same rank, which is its own argument about where a working photographer's real archive lives.

For a working photographer, the value is in that evenness of attention. A still life gets the same rigour as a supermodel; a celebrity is lit with the same care as a shoe. A photographer who can make a shoe compelling is never at the mercy of an uncooperative face. Watson treats every genre as a problem in light and geometry, solvable by the same discipline, and the reassurance in that is real. Master the fundamentals deeply enough and the subject stops dictating whether the picture is any good.

Return to the Turlington profile after the other three hundred pictures, and it reads differently. The exhaled line is no longer a pretty flourish but the whole argument compressed into a single frame: total control worn so lightly it looks like ease, geometry disguised as glamour, drawn by a man who sees the world already flattened into the shape a camera wants.