For four decades the Venetian artist Bruno Rizzi kept what passed through his hands: postcards, photographs, printed ephemera, bundles of paper that settled in his Venice studio the way silt settles in a lagoon. He died in 2004. What he left behind was not an orderly archive but a geology of one life in one city, layered and pressed by time.

Alessandro Laita and Chiaralice Rizzi spent long days inside that studio, working through the accumulation, loosening the images from their old bindings and setting them into a new order. Their 136-page book, published by MACK in 2016 as a paperback, was made while they were recipients of the first Lewis Baltz Research Fund. It offers the material as a gallery of fragments rather than a narrative: the story of a house, of a city, of one person and of more than one.

Lewis Baltz took part in editing the project. Laita and Rizzi, who studied visual arts in Venice and worked as teaching assistants to Baltz and Adrian Paci between 2010 and 2015, have built their own practice around landscape, memory and representation, and this book sits close to those concerns. The assembly is deliberate: 105 colour plates and 114 black-and-white ones, a near-even division that keeps the book’s registers shifting as you turn the pages.

The value of the volume for a collector lies less in any claim of scarcity than in what it documents. It marks the opening project of an institutional fund established to honour Baltz’s vision and memory, and it carries an editorial hand recognisable to anyone who follows his thinking about the built and photographed world. Just as importantly, it complicates the question of authorship in a productive way. The book is credited to its compilers; the many makers of the postcards and photographs it gathers are not enumerated. That dispersal is not an oversight but the condition of the material, and the book treats it as such — an archive of a city seen through other people’s eyes, rearranged into something that reads as one long, quiet act of attention.