Zone Grise is a supplement rather than a stand-alone book, and it wears that role openly. Published by MACK in December 2019, it accompanied Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and extends The Land in Between, her 2018 volume. Where the earlier book stands on its own, this one is made to sit beside it — a French-language addition, not a replacement.

The contents are specific. Shoair Mavlian’s essay appears here in French translation, and Simon Baker, then director of the MEP, wrote a new introduction for this edition. Three fold-out posters are bound into a stapled paperback of 24 pages, measuring 21 by 28 centimetres. The fold-outs are not decoration: they let images and sequences open past the edge of the page, so the object keeps a relation to the wall even as it enters the hand. The Land in Between took the Catalogue of the Year award at the 2018 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Zone Grise belongs to that project without claiming to replace it.

That its text is French only is a condition of the thing, not a defect. It was made for a Paris exhibition and a French-reading public, and the arrangement it records — French prose set against photographs that carry no language of their own — is part of its subject.

For a collection that already holds The Land in Between, Zone Grise preserves the exhibition’s own framing, with writing commissioned and translated for the occasion. For a reader coming to the work for the first time, it is a compact and legible entry into the concerns the larger book develops, and a reminder that a photobook’s margins — the supplement, the translation, the exhibition booklet — can carry weight of their own. Twenty-four pages is very little; used this carefully, it is enough.