Effie Paleologou photographs at night, when a city stops insisting on its own identity. The London and Athens of Tales of Estrangement are the two places she has said she regards as almost home; worked over after dark, they blur into a third, invented one, and it is that fabricated city — unpeopled, lit by artificial sources, oddly resonant in its silence — to which the book seems most attached.

Her subjects are the architectures of transit and temporary stay: railway stations, hotels, multi-storey car parks, seaports, airports. These are places built for arrivals and departures, and Paleologou photographs them in the intervals when nothing is happening. Shadows fall across concrete and glass; lamps and signage produce shapes that read as much as apparition as as structure. The absence of figures does not make the pictures calm. It makes them expectant — spaces where something has just ended or is about to begin, and where the familiar tips into uncertainty.

Two writers accompany the sequence. Brian Dillon and Iain Sinclair appear here as essayists, not as image-makers, and their contributions set Paleologou’s night work within a longer tradition of writing about cities and what they leave behind. Their presence also signals the register the book wants: literary and essayistic, attentive to atmosphere rather than to documentation.

MACK published the book in 2022 as a debossed hardcover, 27 by 33 centimetres and 112 pages — a scale that gives the wide night views room and lets the sequence find its pace across spreads. Format and sequencing matter to the argument being made: these photographs are not offered as reportage from two capitals but as a sustained experience of liminal space.

For a collector of contemporary European photography, the interest lies in that conjunction — a clearly defined subject in the transitory and the liminal, a consistent method of night, artificial light and empty rooms, and a deliberate pairing of pictures with essays. The governing idea is not nostalgia. It is the recognition that alienation and belonging are not opposites; in Paleologou’s city they are one condition, seen at different hours.