Giasco Bertoli photographs tennis courts when no one is playing. In Tennis Courts II, published by Nieves in 2013, the court appears empty — sometimes deserted, sometimes visibly neglected — and the absence of players is not incidental but the condition under which the pictures are made. The publisher describes the book plainly as an artist’s book: a series of dreamlike photographs of unoccupied courts. That phrasing is a fair guide to what the volume does, and to what it declines to do.

Bertoli had already treated this subject in an earlier Tennis Courts. The second book is not a coda but a continuation — the same motif, approached with the same patience, accumulating rather than resolving. What shifts from picture to picture is small: the geometry of a service box, the pull of a fence, a surface gone to seed, light falling across a baseline. Read as a sequence, those differences carry more weight than any single frame.

The object itself is compact: fifty-six pages, paperback, in English, ISBN 9783905999457. Its economy suits the work. A larger, glossier presentation would work against photographs whose interest lies in stillness and in the plain fact of a place being unused. Nieves has built a catalogue around artist’s books of roughly this disposition, and Tennis Courts II sits easily within it.

For a collector, the argument for the book is not scarcity but coherence. It belongs to a sustained body of work about a single motif, made by a photographer who has kept returning to it, and it reads best alongside the volume that came before. Anyone assembling a shelf of contemporary artist’s books — particularly those in which subject, sequence and restraint are inseparable — will find this one worth the space it takes.