Scarti, published by Trolley in 2013, is a book built from the material that normally disappears before a photobook reaches its final form. Its title refers to “scarti di avviamento,” the printer’s term for sheets fed through a press to clean the ink drums between print runs. Saved by publisher Gigi Giannuzzi and discovered after his death in December 2012, these discarded sheets preserve accidental second exposures from the production of Ghetto, the earlier collaboration by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

The book’s subject is therefore both photographic and material. Ghetto documented twelve contemporary gated communities, ranging from a maximum-security prison in South Africa to a psychiatric hospital in Cuba, using large-format colour negative film. In Scarti, those images are overlaid by the mechanics of printing rather than presented as a stable sequence of documentary photographs. A prisoner’s arm may enter a scene of Tanzanian refugees in a tree; an American resident of Leisure World may appear to rest on the knee of a Kurdish lorry driver. The associations are striking, but their source is chance: the images were not composed together, and the press has become an unwitting collaborator.

This tension gives the 64-page hardcover its particular importance for photobook readers. Scarti shifts attention from the finished photograph to the circumstances of its reproduction, making error, waste, and industrial process visible as part of photographic meaning. It is also a concise record of a collaboration involving two principal photographers, Broomberg and Chanarin, and the publishing history surrounding Giannuzzi and Trolley. For collectors, its interest lies less in conventional documentary continuity than in the way it reopens an earlier body of work through found combinations—an unusually clear instance of production residue becoming the book’s central image-making device.