Paul Rousteau made the photographs in Seascapes while artist-in-residence on a boat off Australia’s Coral Sea. Confronted by horizons that gave nothing away, he moved into the darkroom to construct what the publisher calls mental topographies, paring landscape down to water, air and light. The resulting pictures are often saturated, interrupted or thrown out of focus, and they move easily between figuration and abstraction, between painting and digital image-making. Nothing here is offered as documentation; the sea is a starting point, not a subject to be recorded.

What distinguishes the book is the way Rousteau extends that fiction past the last plate. Captions send the reader travelling to places the photographs may never have been, and the design invites an unusually active relationship to the object: readers can tear pages away and reappropriate the seascapes as their own. It is a deliberate invitation to handle a book rather than preserve it, and it changes what the collected images can mean. The 128 pages hold 64 colour plates, printed at 160 × 240 mm and Swiss perfect-bound with cold glue.

Loose Joints published Seascapes in July 2021, with launches in Paris and a signing in Arles that summer. For a collector, the interest lies in that combination of subject and treatment: an artist working at the edge of photography, painting and digital processes, in a volume whose physical form is part of its argument about distance, displacement and the faraway. The publisher also notes A1 silkscreen editions related to the series, which collectors may wish to investigate separately.