Published by MACK in 2013, A Partial Eclipse presents Martin Boyce’s photographs from an ongoing private library of images that feeds into his sculptural practice. Boyce’s wider work is associated with angular reconstructions of the world around him, but this book turns attention toward the psychological and physical landscapes embedded in ordinary surroundings: trees, foliage, built structures, windows, doorways, and the spaces we pass through without always seeing them fully.

The photographs share a sombre, darkened palette, described by the publisher as a kind of mythical permanent dusk. Across the sequence, ellipses and perforations recur alongside cracks, fractures, spider webs, and other irregular patterns. These motifs do not resolve into a straightforward inventory of subjects. Instead, they establish a visual language of interruption and partial visibility, in which familiar environments become distant, suspended, and faintly estranged. The quietness of the images is central to the book’s effect: each photograph seems to withhold as much as it reveals.

The volume’s structure emerged through the editing of hundreds of photographs. That process matters because A Partial Eclipse is not simply an illustrated record of Boyce’s source material; it is a shaped photographic sequence, one in which repetition and pause create a measured sense of separation between viewer and image. The book’s design extends this condition. Photographs are printed on double-sided paper, allowing the image to reflect indistinctly from the coated page onto its matte counterpart. Enclosed between folds, the darkened pictures become both pictures and projections, held at a carefully maintained distance.

For collectors, the book deserves attention as a focused intersection of photography, sculpture, and artist-led book design. It shows how Boyce’s interest in landscape and the built environment can be translated into a sustained sequence rather than a single installation, while making the book itself part of the work’s perceptual logic. Its significance lies in that coherence: subject, editing, surface, and space all contribute to an atmosphere that is restrained, elusive, and distinctly Boyce’s.