Christiane Feser treats the photograph less as a window than as a substance. In the series gathered here, modular constellations are photographed, then physically cut apart, altered, and put back together, so that a flat image acquires the weight and shadow of a relief. The result sits between photograph and object, and it resists the quick scan we normally give pictures. Feser’s constructions ask for slow looking; the eye wants to trace edges that turn out to be folds or seams, and the hand wants to touch what is, by design, too fragile to be handled.

That tension is the point. These works circle around copies and originals, around surface and depth, and around how light gives an object its volume, bringing to mind older arguments about reproduction and authenticity without ever becoming an illustration of them. Feser, born in 1977, works with paper both as image carrier and as material, and the pictures keep that dual status visible. The eighty illustrations in this volume give the series room to unfold.

Hartmann Books published Partitionen in 2017 as a bilingual German and English edition, with essays by Steffen Siegel and Mark Durant that examine the making of the work and place it in an art-historical frame. The Frankfurt studio Pixelgarten designed the volume in close collaboration with the artist. Its material decisions are unusually deliberate: an open-spined softcover with superimposed boards, a twenty-page dust jacket, and colored edges, at 23 by 33 centimeters. The book does not simply document the series; its construction echoes the cut-and-reassemble logic of the pictures.

For collectors drawn to photography that tests its own boundaries, this is a considered example. The large format gives the relief effects room, and the collaboration between artist, writers, and designers means the object reads as a coherent whole rather than a catalogue after the fact.