Antoine d’Agata’s Lilith runs on a single, unresolved relationship. The book portrays the photographer’s involvement with a Cambodian woman who is addicted to methamphetamine and who had been selling sex since she was twelve; the pictures were made in Phnom Penh, and nothing in them is arranged to make the situation easier to look at. Published by La Fábrica, the volume is short — sixty-four pages — and it uses that shortness as pressure rather than as modesty.

d’Agata, long associated with Magnum, has never treated the camera as an observer standing outside the room. He has said that his strategies aim at the highest levels of pleasure or unconsciousness, and that sex and drugs function for him as working methods; he has described part of his recent output as a chaotic, partial sociology of ecstasy. Read against those statements, Lilith is not reportage about addiction and prostitution so much as a record of proximity — of appetite, dependency and complicity, photographed from inside the entanglement.

The book is the first title in La Fábrica’s 64P series, a list founded on the idea that some things have to be brief. The series borrows its model from the short story and the short film and chooses intensity over duration, inviting photographers to work within a deliberately compressed photo-essay. For d’Agata the constraint is a good fit: his subject matter resists the distanced, album-length treatment that a longer book would encourage.

The object itself is modest and deliberate: a paperback in English, sixty-four pages, roughly sixteen by twenty-two centimetres, presented with La Fábrica at Paris Photo in 2017 and since listed in library guides to Southeast Asian photobooks. Its interest for a serious collector is positional rather than speculative. Lilith opens a series, it is the tightest container yet given to a body of work usually encountered in looser, larger books, and it demonstrates how much a photographer of excess can do when the page count is fixed and small.