A new photobook by Matt Henry explores a fictionalised 1960s America through the shifting metaphor of the palm tree.

Pre-Order open. Releases in May 2026.

See the work at Polka Gallery in Paris this spring.

Palm presents three fictional narratives that use the palm tree as an unlikely lens to explore the tumult of 1960s America. Set against a backdrop of exploding consumerism, the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, and a growing countercultural youth, the stories track how the palm—once an unambiguous symbol of colonial exotica—evolved into a more complex cultural metaphor.

A symbol of leisure and luxury, palms in the 1960s helped sell homes, cars, holidays, and products ranging from lipstick to tanning lotions to rum. Palms appeared ghoulishly across the airwaves from Vietnam in America’s first televised war. And palms came to represent escape from Western civilisation for a youthful generation enchanted with the East and eyeing up far-flung destinations across the hippie trail.

The book draws its visual language from the ‘camp’ sensibility famously defined by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, alongside the camp, ironic television of the decade. Shows such as Batman, Bewitched, The Monkees, and Gilligan’s Island often functioned on two levels: as Pop Art-hued entertainment for children, and as a satirical, subtle subversion of 1950s social norms for adults caught up in the bewildering turbulence of the 1960s.

Like these shows, the photographs in Palm contain fantastical sets and locations, and exaggerated clichés that encourage active, interpretive viewing. Moving from suburban Palm Springs to the jungles of Vietnam, and the far-flung destinations of the ‘hippie trail’, Palm embraces the artifice of camp to explore what the palm meant to a generation that was simultaneously selling the idea of palms, fighting beneath them, and running away to find them.

PALM is the 3rd book by Henry after NIGHT OF THE HUNTED and SHORT STORIES.

Technical Specifications

Format: 240 x 295 mm, Portrait

Extent: 136 pages

Images: 53 colour images

Binding: Swiss bound

Language: Essay in English and French

ISBN: 978-3-906822-58-7