Fifty-six photographs, all of them black and white, made across the North Dakota plains: that is the measure of Eugene Richards’s New World, and its discipline as well. Published by Many Voices Press, the book sets those pictures beside writing by Charles Bowden and asks, with very few gestures, what open country still carries of its own past.

The photographs move between what is there now — highway, weather, a horizon that gives nothing away — and older visions of the same ground, so that the plains read as a place inhabited twice over: by the people living on them and by the stories told about them. Richards works close in and without ornament, and the restraint here is structural rather than stylistic. Sequencing and design were treated as part of the book’s making instead of as packaging, which is why the pictures accumulate as an argument rather than simply sit side by side.

Bowden, who died before the book appeared, supplies a counter-voice rather than illustration. Readers who know Richards’s earlier books — among them Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, from 1994 — will recognize the same insistence on photographs that report and refuse to console. What differs is the scale of the subject, a region rather than a street or a room, and the slower tempo the landscape imposes on the looking.

For collectors, the case rests on the edit and the collaboration. Fifty-six plates is a short count for a subject this large, and the spareness is the point: each image has to carry weight in sequence, with nothing available to fill a gap. Set out plainly, the book is a late body of work by a photographer long committed to American documentary, joined to a text left behind by Charles Bowden and issued by a small Brooklyn press. New World deserves attention for how tightly those elements are braided together, and for how little it asks of the reader beyond patience.