Wicked appeared from Schirmer/Mosel in 1998: a slim paperback of fifty-eight pages carrying forty photographs by Ellen von Unwerth. It is not a survey. The book stays with a single collaboration, made with the Brazilian model Adriana Lima, and the title announces its temper — mischievous rather than solemn, erotic without apology.

Across the sequence, von Unwerth stages what her publisher described as a small, intimate witches’ sabbath. Lima romps, dances, rides, and is undressed throughout, the pictures driven by play, insolence and a mood that can turn sly from one frame to the next. The pace is quick, which suits a photographer whose method rests on spontaneity. Von Unwerth, born in 1954, came to the camera by way of modelling, and that history shows in how she provokes and draws out the person in front of her rather than arranging her.

By the late 1990s her fashion and nude photographs were widely published and widely argued over, and Wicked belongs to that moment. Its scale, though, is deliberately modest: one model, forty plates, a compact book. The narrowness is the point. A retrospective would spread her across decades and commissions; this volume keeps to one woman and one idea of pleasure — wry, restless, teasing.

For a collector, the interest lies less in spectacle than in concentration. Schirmer/Mosel has long treated photographic books as coherent objects, and Wicked reads as one: a short, resolved sequence that fixes a working method at a particular point in 1990s image-making. Fifty-eight pages is enough to carry the argument, and little else.