For thirty years, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg travelled through a region she came to call the land in between. Her journeys took her to Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and in 2010 to Syria. The photographs she made there form the substance of this book, published by MACK in 2018. They consider the bond between landscape and human civilization, and the way power is expressed through building—then slowly erased by time.

The subjects are specific: ruins of an abandoned Ottoman railway in Saudi Arabia, decaying Soviet-era bus stops in Armenia, temporary marsh dwellings in Mesopotamia, and the ancient city of Palmyra. Schulz-Dornburg does not treat these as isolated curiosities. She reads them as evidence of how conflict, destruction and decay transform the land, and of a region historically defined not by its own content but by what lies on either side—Europe and Asia, east and west, old and new.

Her 2010 photographs of Palmyra have since become some of the last visual records of the city before its recent destruction. That fact lends the book an unforced gravity, but it is not the only reason to pay attention. The project’s thirty-year span gives it a historical density that few surveys of a single country can match, and it connects ancient civilizations with modern strategic sites without forcing the comparison.

The book itself is a considered object: 254 pages, 28 by 21 cm, with a stitched open spine and a silkscreen printed cover. The design allows the sequence to unfold with minimal interruption, which suits a body of work that depends on accumulation across borders and decades. For a collector, its significance lies in that sustained looking, and in the knowledge that some of what Schulz-Dornburg recorded has already vanished. It is a quiet but substantial addition to a photobook shelf.