Morgan Ashcom began Open while making photographs of daily life in Occupied Palestine in the late twenty-aughts. As Ashcom departed Palestine for his home in the United States, Israeli security forces opened his box of unprocessed film, exposing the images he had made to light. Assuming they were ruined, Ashcom left the mostly unexamined film in his studio for over a decade. Meanwhile, the Israeli-imposed apartheid continued. In the early twenties, Ashcom revisited the negatives and saw new potential in them: the film was not ruined; rather, the tenuously visible images referenced resiliency and vulnerability, censorship and subversion, erasure and the possibility of its reversal. Open is a unique object: a container referencing Ashcom's film box in and of itself, suggesting a paradox—should you open the box, or are you forbidden from doing so? Inside rests a passport-like book containing thirty-four pictures. Translucent pages obscure the imagery with fragments of communications, layering the original violence of the film's exposure with a quiet, ongoing reckoning. The book is itself a model of the conditions in which the photographs were made.