Neil Drabble’s Tree Tops Tall begins with a refusal of taxonomy. The trees gathered here are not ordered by species, habitat or geography; what holds them together is a simpler, more stubborn condition — foliage and branches set against a bright sky. Across the series, made over several years, that motif functions as a state of mind, a formal expression of the self. The pictures read less as records of place than as exercises in attention.

The viewpoint is a child’s. Each photograph is taken looking upward, with the awe and slight dislocation of standing beneath something far larger than oneself. Drabble’s approach is intimate and studied rather than documentary, favouring clarity, colour and the pleasures of seeing over anecdote or information.

The book’s design sustains the same argument. Forty colour plates run without interruption, each spread across a double page, in a large format that gives the sky room to work as ground. No explanatory apparatus breaks the sequence, so the upward rhythm holds from first page to last. As an object, it is as deliberate as the looking is.

For a collector, the case rests on that coherence rather than on any claim about scarcity: a single-minded body of work, published by SteidlMACK in 2003, in which subject, vantage point, sequencing and format are unusually well matched. It is a book to return to — not for what it documents, but for how steadily it asks you to look up.