Behind the Glass gathers work by Alexandra Catiere across an early series made in Minsk and Moscow in 2005 and 2006, a body of pictures that had gone unpublished, alongside further selected images and a group of camera-less photograms made with light, sensitized paper, pebbles, and grass. Portraits, landscapes, and these abstract experiments share a narrow register of black, gray, and white. Published by Chose Commune in 2018, the book runs to 256 pages and holds sixty-four black-and-white photographs, produced as a section-sewn hardcover measuring 14.5 by 19.5 centimeters.

The editing and sequencing were carried out by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi and Vasantha Yogananthan, with design by Bureau Kayser in collaboration with both editors. Their arrangement resists the monographic survey: each double spread opens vertically, so the reader encounters one photograph at a time and sets the pace of looking. The book proposes a constellation rather than a chronology, drawing a through-line across fifteen years of Catiere’s attention to faces, bodies, and objects.

Catiere’s biography gives the pictures a specific geography. Born in Minsk and now based in Paris, she trained at the International Center of Photography in New York and worked as an assistant to Irving Penn; she won the Festival de la Photographie d’Hyères in 2007 and the first BMW Residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2012. Behind the Glass was shortlisted for Photobook of the Year at the Aperture Paris Photo Book Awards in 2018.

For a collector, the case rests on the structure of the object as much as on the individual plates. The unpublished Minsk and Moscow series, the new photograms, and the vertical opening of every spread together form a considered whole, one in which sequence and handling determine meaning. It is a book that rewards slow attention rather than quick flipping.