Tomoko Yoneda’s We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness borrows its title from a sentence spoken to Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The allusion sets the pitch of the book: it is not an argument about catastrophe but a record of what remains in places where catastrophe happened. Heibonsha published it in 2013 as the catalogue to Yoneda’s exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

The photographs were made across sites in Asia and Europe whose histories are severe and overlapping — ground once inhabited, remembered now mostly by the people who left it. Yoneda photographs the present tense of these places, the unhurried time that has settled over them, and lets the earlier violence stay legible inside ordinary views: grief within clarity, endurance within emptiness, a quiet hope inside disaster.

The book runs to 179 pages in hardcover, roughly 25 by 20 centimetres, with colour and black-and-white plates and writing by Kurokawa Sou. As a museum catalogue it is a considered object rather than a retrospective; the sequencing carries an argument that no single image could.

That is the case for a collection. The volume fixes a specific body of work at a specific moment, documented at length and accompanied by commissioned text, which makes it the primary printed source for this exhibition and its imagery. Yoneda’s practice has been built over long periods abroad and in Japan, and this book holds one strand of it steady long enough to be studied — sequence, place and text working together rather than photographs alone.