Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have spent their careers working inside the friction between photojournalism and visual art, producing pictures that resist settling into a single reading. Humans and Other Animals, published by Tate Publishing in 2015, carries that instinct into an unlikely place: the alphabet book. Sixty-four pages, hardcover, at a modest 274 by 219 mm, it was made as their first book for children — and it treats the form as a real problem rather than a pretext.

The structure is an ABC in which black-and-white photographs, short text and brightly coloured graphics are set against one another. Familiar words are paired with images that pull slightly away from them, so that the relation between picture and caption becomes the subject. Broomberg and Chanarin’s photographs appear alongside archival material from the Getty Archive in London, and the book was produced with students and staff at the Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children, with British Sign Language built into the pages. It asks a young reader to “listen with their eyes” — an instruction that also describes what the artists ask of adults.

That double address is where the book’s weight lies. It belongs to a longer history of children’s photobooks taken seriously enough to be shown as such; it has figured in a survey of that history presented in Arles, in the exhibition “L is for Look.” Seen from there, the alphabet is less a limitation than a working constraint the artists chose for themselves.

For a collector, the appeal is not scarcity but hinge-work. Here two conceptual artists accept twenty-six letters and a child’s eye, then use them to test whether a photograph can be read the way a sign is read: learned, embodied, shared. Placed beside their adult projects, it clarifies a through-line; opened on its own, it remains a strange and generous object.