Incoming began as a multi-channel film installation and became a book. MACK published it in 2017: 576 pages, with texts by Richard Mosse and the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and with images taken from the moving-image work itself. That origin deserves emphasis. Mosse made the film with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost; the plates here are film stills, and the volume keeps faith with that collaborative making rather than presenting itself as a conventional photographic survey.

The subject is displacement — the movement of millions across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe — and the instrument Mosse chose to see it through. He worked with a weapons-grade surveillance camera that registers heat rather than colour, able to detect a human body at a distance of roughly thirty kilometres. Blind to skin tone, it records only relative differences in temperature, and so renders people as thermal contours: fragile bodies struggling for survival in hostile ground.

The sequence follows the film. A live battle inside Syria, where a US aircraft strafes positions on the ground; refugees boarding rescue boats off Libya; people gathered on Turkish shores under cover of darkness; the crossing of the Sahara; the burning of the Jungle camp. Mosse’s stated intention was not detached reportage but exposure of the camera’s own logic — to see the way missiles see — and, with it, the ethical, logistical and aesthetic questions raised by working with such a device.

The book’s manufacture is as considered as its argument. Two hundred and eighty metallic tritone plates run across 576 pages in an OTA-bound softback with a metallic silkscreened cover and black painted edges, a format that holds the thermal palette steady and gives the sequence room. A related body of work, Heat Maps, was awarded the 2017 Prix Pictet.

For a collector, the case rests less on scarcity than on construction: a specific technical condition of seeing, a film-derived image sequence, and essays that place both in historical context.