Thomas Struth’s self-titled book, published by MACK in September 2014, collects sixteen photographs he made in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2009, 2011 and 2014. The scope is deliberately narrow: one region, revisited over several years, pictured in fragments.

Struth did not abandon the categories that have organized his career — street scenes, portraits, landscapes, photographs of high technology. He applied them here, so that each image belongs at once to a familiar mode and to a specific contested ground. Struth has described the aim as capturing “a particle of the conflict of the region,” working image by image rather than toward a summary view.

Ulrich Loock’s essay proposes that the series is held together by “strata of antitheses” that reveal themselves as a matrix running through the work. That reading matters: it explains how photographs of separate subjects can accumulate into a portrait of a place where coexistence has failed. The book also marks a shift in Struth’s practice, since every exposure is tied to a single geographical and political reality — as though one territory could contain the range of human experience he has pursued elsewhere.

Struth, born in 1954, trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and later taught photography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. His work has been widely exhibited and published, but this volume is unusually concentrated. A serious collector might note how the sequence tests the limits of photography before a reality it cannot fully make visible, and how Loock’s essay gives that test a critical language. It is a book about method as much as subject.