In 1970, the Hollywood adaptation of Catch-22 was filmed on the coast of the Sea of Cortés, near San Carlos, Mexico. The production left behind roads, control towers, abandoned villas, an airstrip, and a buried bomber—the so-called “Mexican plane.” Decades later, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin traveled to the site with a team of archaeologists to exhume it. What they found was not an aircraft but fragments: thousands of pieces of aluminum, rusty nails, rabbit droppings. The desert had reclaimed the ground.

Dodo takes that absence as its subject. The vanished plane becomes an analogue for the dodo, the first species on Earth to be driven to extinction by human activity. Four centuries after its last confirmed sighting, no intact skeleton and no reliable image of the bird survive; only a single egg remains. The book does not attempt to reverse that loss. Instead, it examines the conditions of erasure—how evidence decays, how images fail, how history is built from what is left.

Broomberg and Chanarin are credited as the photographers of this collaborative project, published by RM Verlag in association with Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. The first edition, a paperback of roughly 150 pages and 32 by 20 centimeters, appeared in 2014. Its structure and sequencing are part of the argument: photography here is not a tool of recovery but a participant in the same processes of disappearance it documents.

For collectors, the book matters less as a record of an excavation than as an artists’ book that tests the limits of photographic evidence. It sits alongside the exhibition it accompanied, and it belongs to a body of work in which Broomberg and Chanarin treat the archive as a site of contradiction. The dodo’s egg—the one surviving object—is a fitting emblem: a thing that cannot be restored, only contemplated.