Between November 2014 and December 2016, Melissa Arras photographed in Calais, where migrants and refugees were living in temporary encampments. El Dorado, published by the London independent Overlapse Books in 2019, gathers that work into sixty-four pages. The title carries its own charge: it names a legendary city of gold while pointing to a place where people slept in the open and waited.

Arras does not keep the distance of news reporting. Her photographs move close, favouring fragments, gestures and the intervals between people; the sequence makes its case through arrangement rather than through captions or testimony. What emerges is an abstract record of intimacy — a book about ordinary days lived in transit, not about the spectacle of the camp. The object itself holds to the same restraint: softcover and saddle-stitched at 18.6 by 23 cm, with an interior tip-in and a folded A3 poster, the cover finished with a reflective gold sticker that quietly repeats the title’s promise.

The project was shortlisted for the D&AD Next Photographer Award in 2016 and has appeared in exhibition form, including in Margate. Read now, El Dorado belongs to a specific and contested period of image-making around Calais, when photographs of the encampments were plentiful and often anonymous in effect. Arras’s contribution is slower and more withheld, asking how much of another person’s everyday can be seen at all.

For collectors who value the photobook as a designed thing, the relevant facts are plain. This is the first edition, in English, and it is out of print. Its interest lies in the meeting of a tightly defined two-year body of work, an early award shortlisting, and an unusually considered physical package from an independent publisher. It is not a large or luxurious book; it is a small, exact one, and its scarcity followed rather than being engineered.