In November 2015, during the terrorist attacks in Paris, Paul Graham was staying in an apartment in the city with his partner and young child. The book takes its title from those days—Paris 11–15th November, 2015—and gathers a series he made in response to the tension in the streets. It was published by MACK in 2016.

The physical object is modest: 88 pages, 30 colour plates, a linen flexi bound hardcover, 18.3 x 25.8 cm. A viewer looking for the attacks will not find them pictured. Graham withholds the obvious iconography of violence and lets another register surface: an inscrutable longing for safety, for the ordinary, for what is known. That gap between the event outside and the images inside gives the work its pressure. It is not reportage; it is a study of proximity, fear, and the domestic frame under strain.

The compact dimensions and linen binding give the book a plain, portable presence, while the thirty colour plates keep the emphasis on looking rather than spectacle. MACK’s edition does not explain Paris in those days. It allows photographs to hold a contradiction: the need for the familiar when the familiar has become precarious.

For collectors, this is a title that rewards attention as a historical object and as an artist’s book. Graham has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hasselblad Award and the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photo Book Awards prize for best photographic book of the past 15 years. But the strongest argument is internal: how a photographer of his experience answers a public catastrophe with reticence. The book does not claim to document the attacks. It records the longing for safety that runs beneath them, and it trusts photography to carry that unease without showing its cause.