In 2011, MACK published a 416-page hardcover whose title reads like a phrase lifted from a report and left deliberately unfinished. Its authors are Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and the pictures are not their own. The book comes out of the archive of Belfast Exposed, where the two artists spent time with contact sheets made during the Troubles in Northern Ireland — sheets that had already passed through many hands before reaching theirs.

Their subject is the accumulation. Crop marks, grease pencil, stickers, captions, filing decisions: the publisher’s account describes the pair excavating the interventions of photographers, community groups, researchers and archivists, and it draws a firm conclusion from them — we learn as much about the people charged with looking after the archive as about the people portrayed in it. Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 and now holds more than half a million items; the authorship of the historical photographs is not enumerated.

The credits are worth stating plainly. Broomberg and Chanarin are the artists who selected and reworked the material; they are not the photographers of the images inside it, and the book does not pretend otherwise. That distinction shapes the reading.

At 24 by 21 centimetres and 416 pages, the volume gives the archive’s noise room to accumulate rather than resolving it into a single narrative. The result belongs to a body of work in which the two artists have kept testing what photographs can and cannot be made to say.

For a collector, the argument for the book lies in that method rather than in scarcity. It treats an archive not as a store of evidence but as a record of custody — of who touched what, and why.