In 2016, the informal settlement known as the Jungle, near Calais, was dismantled. Gideon Mendel’s Dzhangal approaches that place through what its residents left behind. The photographs gather discarded objects recovered from the camp: toothbrushes and playing cards, worn-out trainers, teargas canisters, children’s dolls. Read together, they form an alternative portrait of the camp’s residents through the ordinary items of daily life and the residue of conflict.

Mendel, the project’s photographer, does not show the camp’s inhabitants directly. He lets objects carry the account, and the sequence depends on that restraint. A doll and a gas canister belong to different stories but appear in the same unhurried register, suggesting that domestic habit and violence occupied the same ground.

GOST Books published Dzhangal in 2017 at eighty pages, in a hardback clothbound edition with screen-printed covers. The choice of a hard, printed surface rather than a slick picture-book finish suits the material; the object is built to be handled, the way the objects in the photographs were. Such decisions are not incidental to the work. They determine how the photographs are encountered, one after another, at book scale.

The book’s interest lies in its method as much as its subject. It is a considered response to a widely photographed crisis, made by a photographer who chose not to repeat the established imagery. Its place is among photobooks that test how documentary can address displacement without consuming the people involved. Presented in English, it remains a compact, disciplined example of that tendency.