Verso Reverso is the first book by Patricio Reig, an Argentinian photographer born in San Juan in 1959 who has lived and worked for years in Milan. Its territory is the female portrait, but the book attends less to a settled likeness than to the instant one appears. Reig holds together the two sides any portrait implies: the face and the nape of the neck, front and reverse, light and shadow.

The making of the pictures cannot be separated from what they show. Reig prints his images on a special oriental paper, folds it again and again, and then dips the sheet into a bath of coffee and sodium thiosulfate. Little about this is tidy. Fortuitous coffee stains settle into the surface and mark the sheet like scars, distinguishing one photograph from the next. Paper ceases to be a support and becomes one of the conditions under which the portrait exists.

The process also carries an argument about portraiture. In Reig’s account, a portrait is not the record of a single identity but the layering of many elements; an image may be fragmented, pieced back together, or folded over and still keep its essence. The editing follows that logic, letting pictures rest between the legible and the obscured.

Reig came to photography after completing a doctorate in architecture in Barcelona, then studied the medium on his own. His career has unfolded between Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Milan, and a long engagement with alternative photographic processes runs through the work. His photographs are held in public and private collections in America, Europe and Asia.

That this is a publishing debut matters in how the book should be read: it opens a body of work in print rather than summarising one. Five Continents Editions gives it 96 pages at 25 x 35 cm, with texts in English, French and Spanish, a scale that lets the treated sheets register. For a collector drawn to photographs that are also physical records of their own manufacture, it is a considered place to begin.