In 2021 the Dutch publisher Eriskay Connection released *Novogen*, a 112-page book conceived and photographed by Dániel Szalai. The title names a chicken — the Novogen White Light, bred specifically so that its eggs can serve the manufacture of medicines and vaccines. Szalai, working in Hungary and the Netherlands, photographed the industrial facilities, the process of vaccine production, and above all an extensive series of individual portraits of the birds themselves. The result is neither exposé nor advocacy, but a patient accounting of what it means to engineer a living creature as a pharmaceutical instrument.

The book’s structure is deliberate. The portraits anchor it; the facility and process pictures establish the conditions under which these animals exist. Into that visual argument the book folds a reflective essay by the philosopher Fahim Amir, extracts from the Novogen White Light management guide, and the producing company’s own marketing materials. Documentary photographs and corporate and technical language sit side by side, and the reader is left to reconcile them. Szalai proposes that how these chickens are conceptualised — as units, as inputs — can stand as a metaphor for human positions in the job market and in political life.

Rob van Hoesel’s design, at 21 × 28.6 cm and bound as a selfcover with a linen cap, gives the sequence a spare, almost administrative composure suited to its subject. The edition is the first, at 600 copies, and the book is in English. Lithography, production, printing and binding were handled by named specialists in the Netherlands. For a collector attentive to contemporary photography that thinks through biotechnology, labour and the manufactured boundary between nature and industry, *Novogen* is a considered and durable piece of bookmaking.