At the Pyramids of Giza in 2012, Oliver Curtis made the decision that would shape Volte-Face: he turned his camera away from the monument and toward the direction from which he had arrived. Developed over the following four years at heavily photographed historic sites and national monuments around the world, the project addresses not the landmarks themselves but the fields of vision conventionally excluded by looking at them.

Curtis declines the familiar contest to produce yet another definitive image of an already celebrated structure. Instead, he attends to service roads, peripheral buildings, barriers, vegetation and working spaces—the incidental landscapes that tourism and its photographs tend to pass over. These surroundings may initially appear ordinary, yet they register the practical systems and accumulated histories that sustain each attraction. Janitors, cleaners, guards and other staff return the monumental site to the realm of daily labour.

The book’s reversal of viewpoint is both a formal device and a critique of visual habit. By withholding the expected icon, Curtis asks how cultural importance is constructed through framing, repetition and omission. Across the sequence, places usually treated as backgrounds become the primary evidence. Their quietness is not an absence of meaning; it permits subtler social and spatial narratives to emerge beyond the prescribed view.

Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2016, this 96-page hardcover includes an afterword by Geoff Dyer. Its significance for a photobook collection rests in the coherence of its premise and in the sustained application of that premise across multiple emblematic locations. Volte-Face belongs to a line of photographic inquiry concerned with monuments, tourism and overlooked labour, while its disciplined act of turning away gives those concerns a particularly clear and economical form.