Aleix Plademunt’s *Almost There*, published by MACK in 2013, begins with an improbable event: a postcard arriving 101 years late. From that delayed message, Plademunt constructs a photographic inquiry into time, distance, and the unstable scale at which the world becomes intelligible. The book’s premise is not simply to record faraway places, but to test how photography can bring the imperceptibly small and the incomprehensibly large within the reach of human perception.

The sequence moves outward and inward at once. Images of red blood cells and Plademunt’s father in his youth establish a bodily and familial point of departure; the narrative then expands through the visual conventions of the road trip, vast Canadian landscapes, the Solar System, and the M79 globular cluster, 42,000 light years from Earth. Along the way, archaeological remains, found objects, animals, interiors, landscapes, and skyscapes enter into an intentionally unsettled constellation. The book’s force lies in these displacements: documentary habits, scientific imagery, personal memory, and inherited pictures are placed beside one another without being reduced to a single explanatory system.

Plademunt’s practice is rooted in landscape, yet *Almost There* treats landscape less as a stable subject than as a point from which photographic traditions can be questioned. Its images repeatedly approach their subjects without fully possessing them, producing the book’s governing sensation of being neither close enough nor far enough away. At 116 pages, the hardcover is a compact, carefully bounded form for an expansive conceptual range, and its two gatefolds extend the act of looking beyond the ordinary page.

For collectors, the book deserves attention as a sustained book work rather than a straightforward portfolio. Its significance rests in the way sequencing turns radically different scales and sources into a coherent experience of distance and displacement, while leaving the underlying uncertainty intact. *Almost There* asks what it means to understand an image—and what remains beyond reach once the world has been framed.