For roughly two decades, Thibaut Derien has driven the secondary roads of France, turning away from the franchised sprawl that lines the autoroutes. What draws his camera is almost the opposite of spectacle: the last small shops, closed for good, their shutters down and their windows bricked, weathered by time but still standing. The book gathers these facades into what its publisher calls a ghost town. Read together, they make an argument about what gets lost when commerce moves to distant shopping centres — not only trade but the proximity, community and human contact the storefront once framed.
The twenty-fifth title in Setanta Books’ bi-monthly series devoted to emerging photographers, 025 – Thibaut Derien arrives as a 48-page softcover with a card wraparound cover, measuring 21 by 16 centimetres and published in an edition of 350 copies in 2025. The series context matters: it is a continuing sequence, not a one-off, and Derien’s contribution sits alongside earlier numbers by Luka Khabelashvili, Margaret Durow, Michael McCluskey, Hollie Fernando and others, each given a compact, consistent format. The book’s design keeps the photographs close to the object it describes — small, portable, resistant to the very scale of the commercial architecture it quietly opposes.
Derien’s route into photography is unusual. A singer in the 2000s, he found the medium while touring, and has since left music behind, trading words for images and sound for stillness. That background shapes the work’s temperament: these are mute, still pictures, but they carry a kind of attentiveness that feels closer to listening than to looking. The emotional register is restrained — decay observed with dignity rather than nostalgia or irony.
For collectors, the case is straightforward and worth stating plainly. A numbered, bi-monthly series with a defined edition size and a consistent format is the kind of publishing project that rewards sustained attention; individual volumes acquire meaning in relation to the run. Derien’s subject, meanwhile, has a documentary seriousness that outlasts its occasion: a record of small commerce vanishing from the French landscape, made by someone who chose the back roads on purpose.
