Three things named without ceremony: meat, fish, aubergine caviar. Alex Blanco’s title for his Overlapse book sets two everyday staples beside a dish that asks for patience, and lets the conjunction carry the ambiguity. Published in English in late 2023 as a paperback of roughly 16 by 21 centimetres, the volume leans a little wider than it is tall — a format that gives horizontal frames room to breathe and keeps the sequence, rather than the individual plate, in view.

Blanco is credited as the photographer. Alongside the visual record, library cataloguing files the book under photography and under general cookery, which is a useful, if blunt, description of where it sits: at the meeting point of food, its handling, and the act of looking at both. The title’s third term is the giveaway. Meat and fish arrive as raw categories; aubergine caviar arrives as something already made, a dish assembled from a vegetable and named after something it is not. A book that organises itself around that shift is likely to be less interested in appetite than in translation — in how a substance becomes an image, and how a name becomes a promise.

That is where the book’s distinctiveness rests. It works through sequence and juxtaposition rather than through any single spectacular frame, and the modest trim size supports the effect: this is a volume meant to be handled, read through in a sitting, and returned to. Nothing about the design is grandiose; the intelligence is in the editing.

For a collector of contemporary photography, that is the case for attention. A small-press paperback on a subject that sits between documentary and still life, made with restraint and a clear structural idea, belongs on the shelf next to other books that treat food as material for looking rather than as material for consumption.