Metamorpolis is Tim Franco’s photographic study of China’s ultra-urbanisation. Published in 2015 by Pendant ce Temps, the book places the rapid remaking of the country’s cities at the centre of a sustained body of work. Its subject is not urban life in the broadest sense, but the intensified process by which metropolitan space is produced, enlarged and transformed.

The monographic approach matters. Rather than treating individual photographs as isolated observations, Metamorpolis gathers Franco’s work around a single historical and geographic question. The book form gives that inquiry a defined scale: 111 pages in a broad 30 × 26.5 cm hardcover volume. The format establishes an extended setting in which urbanisation can be considered as a condition unfolding across multiple images, rather than as a single emblematic scene.

Metamorpolis was Franco’s first monograph, giving the project a particular place within his bibliography. It also belongs specifically to the mid-2010s, offering a photographic record shaped during a consequential phase of China’s urban development. For collectors concerned with contemporary representations of China, the publication is valuable as a focused authorial work whose subject links photography, architecture and the social history of metropolitan change without reducing the city to a neutral backdrop.

The edition presents its text in French, English and Chinese, an unusually pertinent editorial decision for a project situated between Chinese subject matter and an international photographic audience. That multilingual framework, together with the book’s concentrated theme and substantial horizontal format, distinguishes Metamorpolis as more than a compilation of city photographs. It is a clearly bounded examination of urban transformation and an important early marker in Franco’s work in monograph form.