Carla Liesching was born at the Cape of Good Hope. The book she made about the place, published by MACK in 2021, refuses to treat it as scenery. Its 192 pages circle the gardens and grounds of the Cape, a site that carries the whole apparatus of empire in its soil.

Named by Portuguese navigators during what they called the Age of Discovery, the Cape sat at the midpoint of the Spice Route, and the refreshment station later built there set capital moving between what were then called east and west. Today the same ground is a centre of anti-colonial resistance. Good Hope holds both facts at once, and neither cancels the other.

Liesching works by assemblage rather than by sequence. Documentary prose, personal essay and found photographic material accumulate in layers, drawn from apartheid-era trade journals, tourist pamphlets, National Geographic and Life magazines, contemporary newspapers and family albums. She is credited as the book’s author; the photographs come from elsewhere, and the original image makers are not named in it. That anonymity is part of the argument.

What the book examines is not only White supremacist settler-colonialism as it persists now but the habits of mind that produced it: looking, discovering, collecting, codifying, preserving, naming, knowing, and putting to language. The result is intimate and critical at once, and it asks whether a book can document a place without repeating the gestures that once claimed it.

For a collector, the interest lies in how tightly the book’s form and its thinking are bound together. MACK issued it in 2021 as an OTA-bound paperback with flaps, and it was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards in 2022. This is an artist’s book in the strict sense: the arrangement is the argument.