Alias was published in 2011 by Fundacja Sztuk Wizualnych, an independent Polish visual-arts foundation, and it runs to 320 pages. Four names appear on it: Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Anna Szczepańska-Krasoń and Janusz Krasoń. No single photographer carries the book; the credits are collective, and the language throughout is Polish.

The title has been read, in later commentary, as “None of the Artists Exist,” and that reading suits the material’s concerns: authorship as disguise, the alias as a working method, the difficulty of assigning a picture to a particular hand. Editorial writing has also linked Alias to the 2011 Kraków Photomonth, where it served as the accompanying catalogue — a festival volume rather than one artist’s monograph, which goes some way toward explaining its extent.

That extent is the point. A catalogue assembled for an edition of a photography festival has to hold several positions at once, and Alias does so without smoothing them into a single voice. The result sits closer to an exhibition in book form than to a portfolio: sequence, juxtaposition and the friction between contributions carry as much weight as any individual frame.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in that structure rather than in any claim about scarcity. It is a foundation-published, Polish-language catalogue with four credited contributors, dated 2011, and no single signature. It records how a festival commission could be built around shared and deliberately unstable authorship instead of around one photographer’s name — a useful document of a subjunctive mode in recent photographic bookmaking, and one best read as a catalogue than as a retrospective.