Elemer gathers fifty-four color plates around a single figure who is never fully explained. Marton Perlaki photographs this man — moving, posing, being remade before the lens — and lets his gestures pull wit, hallucination, and oddness out of ordinary still lifes, landscapes, and portraits made in Hungary. We are not told who Elemér is; the book proceeds as though the question can be set aside. What matters is the transformation, at once gestural and literal, of a body into material.

The book’s method comes from an unlikely source: cigarette cards, those early twentieth-century disposables printed with a household tip on one side and a picture on the other. Perlaki began collecting them, noticing how a nonsensical image suddenly made sense once flipped. That reversal governs the sequencing here. Birds, bubbles, bricks, potatoes, and Elemér himself are pulled from their settings and set loose against one another, so the absurd emerges from the factual and the delicate from the concrete.

Loose Joints published the book in May 2016: 102 pages in a section-sewn hardcover with colored boards and a silkscreen cover, accompanied by an essay from Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Perlaki came to the work from cinematography and photojournalism, and the plates carry something of both — a cameraman’s timing, a reporter’s plainness — held together by an editing intelligence that never settles into a single register.

For a collector, Elemer repays attention precisely where it resists summary. Its collisions are structural, not decorative, and they reward repeated looking: an image’s sense changes depending on which plate precedes it. Perlaki’s first book remains a compact demonstration of how sequencing and design can make a body of pictures behave like an argument rather than a portfolio.