The eighty-fifth entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series takes a single photograph as its subject and pulls it apart. Roger Ballen’s The Audience returns to an image from his earlier book Asylum of the Birds, dismantling the photograph so that its constituent pictorial elements can be examined at close range. Alongside eleven duotone plates, the volume presents the drawings embedded in that image, lifted out and shown individually, so that what normally reads as a dense, unified scene becomes a sequence of isolated marks and fragments.

That operation is characteristic of Ballen’s broader practice, in which drawing, found material, and photography bleed into one another, but it acquires a particular clarity at this scale. The book runs to sixteen pages, small enough to be held and read as an object rather than a portfolio, and the progressive separation of the picture’s parts gives the reader something closer to an anatomy lesson than a survey. Each plate asks the viewer to look again at a surface that had previously resolved into a single, unsettling whole.

The book belongs to a series defined by restraint: one artist, one image, one compact hardcover. Within that constraint, The Audience is unusually introspective, turning a finished photograph back into working material and exposing the graphic thinking underneath it. It sits at the intersection of Ballen’s photographic and draughtsman’s instincts, and it documents a method as much as an image.

The edition is limited to five hundred numbered copies and includes an original signed photograph, which gives the volume a place among collectors of Ballen’s work and of the One Picture Book series. The photograph ties the book to the artist’s hand rather than only to the press, while the deconstruction inside offers a sustained look at how one of his best-known images is built. For a collector interested in process, in the boundary between photography and drawing, or in the series as a publishing project, this is a considered addition.