The Chicago of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s 2006 book is not in Illinois. It is an artificial Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force in the Negev desert as a full-scale training ground for urban combat — the rehearsal site, as the volume’s full title has it, for what came later: Beirut, the two Intifadas, the Gaza withdrawal, Falluja.

Broomberg and Chanarin photograph that town and the territory around it without pretending the camera can stand outside the arrangement. The pictures keep the texture of reportage while loosening its claims: streets built as sets, buildings assembled for a script, objects that change identity the moment they are examined. A watermelon turns out to be a suicide bomb; a quiet forest becomes the scene of a forensic investigation; a pastoral view is a war zone. The sequence opens in the training town and closes in a sniper’s lair, tightening as it goes.

Steidl issued the book in hardcover in 2006, in English, at roughly 33 by 25 centimetres — a scale at which the fabrications hold their detail. Eyal Weizman is credited alongside the photographers as a contributing writer, and that presence signals what the book is doing: not war reporting, but an argument about how conflict is built, rehearsed and pictured.

For a serious collector the case rests on the work rather than on scarcity. This is a photobook whose subject is the reliability of the photograph itself, made by two photographers whose joint practice keeps testing the border between document and construction. It sits naturally beside other studies of staged terrain and mediated conflict, and it rewards returning: the more familiar these landscapes become, the less stable they look.