John Davies has spent decades photographing the European landscape as something made and remade rather than simply found. Retraced 81/19, published by GOST Books in 2019, sets his early pictures beside contemporary ones made from the same vantage points, so that each pairing measures what nearly four decades of human activity have done to a place. The camera stays where it stood; the ground does not.

That method is the book’s real subject. Seen side by side, motorways, housing, industrial ground and the remnants of older settlement register as layers in a single continuous process. Davies works in black and white, and the format suits an argument about structure, tone and use rather than nostalgia or spectacle: what changes, what persists, and how the two are held in the same frame.

The pairing also gives the work its documentary weight. These are not before-and-after curiosities but records of cultural and social change, mapped with the patience of someone who knows the terrain. Continuity and disruption appear together, which is a more honest account of how landscapes actually develop than either term alone allows.

The 192-page clothbound edition, foil debossed, treats the sequence as the argument. It is a considered addition to a shelf that already takes the documentary tradition seriously.

Photographs by John Davies. Published by GOST Books, 2019. 192 pages. Hardback, clothbound, foil debossed.