In *Universe*, Jos Jansen photographs the machinery of fundamental science — gravitational-wave detectors, DNA laboratories, soft robotics, the search for distant galaxies — and then does something less expected. Working with his own images, found footage and data visualisations, he assembles a parallel universe alongside the one researchers actually study. The result is a book of traces, where empirical evidence and speculative image-making occupy the same pages.

The project grew out of a documentary commission from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Amsterdam City Archives, and Jansen made his photographs at Amsterdam Science Park, across institutions including the University of Amsterdam, Nikhef and Amolf. His access to laboratories and research groups is not incidental to the pictures; it shapes them. Trained as a psychologist, he tends to register the human presence inside specialised environments, the people who spend careers on questions whose applications may not arrive for decades.

Essays by Jos Jansen and by Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, extend the book’s argument about curiosity, facts and long-term thinking in an era of alternative facts. The narrative construction is Jansen’s together with Rob van Hoesel, who also designed the volume; the 160-page Otabind softcover, at 21.6 by 32.1 centimetres, gives the sequencing and the image-data juxtapositions unusual room.

For collectors attuned to photography that engages science without merely illustrating it, *Universe* is a considered example: an artist’s book that treats research as a subject for visual thought and holds its documentary and fabricated elements in deliberate tension.