Ljubodrag Andric, born in Belgrade and now based in Toronto, has worked for decades at the threshold where a photograph stops behaving like a document and starts behaving like a painted surface. India, published by Hartmann Books, gathers work made during travels through the country between 2019 and 2024. The starting points were historical buildings, but the results are not architectural records. Andric treats walls, courtyards, and layered patinas as fields of light and geometry, so that what a viewer recognizes first is a structure of color and interval, and only later a place.
The physical book is unusual, and its form argues for the pictures. Two books are bound dos-à-dos — back to back, sharing a single volume — and housed in a slipcase, with foil-stamped type and a laser cutout on the cover. The Dutch studio SYB designed the sequence, alternating full-page plates with double-page details. That rhythm recreates the tempo of standing before the original works, where the eye moves between the whole composition and the texture of a single passage. The tactile, fresco-like quality of Andric’s surfaces is carried into the material choices of the edition itself.
Essays by Barry Schwabsky, Amit Chaudhuri, and Francesco Tedeschi accompany the plates, placing the project in conversation with painting, with Indian architecture, and with travel as a mode of attention rather than documentation. Andric, born in Belgrade in 1965, developed his first photographic interests at fifteen and devoted himself exclusively to photography from 1987 onward; he lived and worked in Rome and Milan before settling in Canada. That displaced biography informs a body of work that has never sat comfortably inside a single national tradition.
The volume runs 208 pages with roughly 180 pictures, in a format of 26.4 by 35 centimeters. For collectors drawn to photography that tests its own boundaries — to books in which design, sequence, and reproduction are part of the argument — this is a considered and substantial object. Its interest lies not in spectacle but in the discipline of looking it asks for, and in the care with which the two-book structure stages that demand.
