Mårten Lange made Ghost Witness during repeated visits to Chinese megacities, and the book records what rapid, hyper-accelerated growth leaves in its wake. The photographs attend to lighting conditions specific to these environments: sun breaking through polluted air, arrays of LEDs reflected in rain, a world revealed obliquely rather than directly. The title borrows from China’s long tradition of supernatural storytelling, but the ghost here is historical—the past trailing a country aimed squarely at the future, visible only as interference in the smog.
The book is organized around the grid. Lange adopts the machine logic of rationalized urban planning, then presses on it to find the gaps: broken windows, indecipherable codes, decay and entropy lodged inside the order of glass and steel. The subject is not architecture alone. By keeping the frames precise and the sequencing steady, the book draws out the overlaps among buildings, technology, surveillance, and the future, and asks what it means to live in environments that are planned, designed, and repeated, with little slack for history, transition, or change.
Loose Joints published Ghost Witness in November 2020 as an OTA-bound embossed softcover measuring 23.3 by 34 centimeters, with 168 pages and 127 tritone plates. The tall format and the tritone reproduction suit the subject’s flat tonalities and the way the photographs treat urban light as something that both conceals and measures. The binding opens cleanly across full spreads, which matters for sequences where adjacent images set up quiet correspondences rather than dramatic contrasts.
The book was nominated for the Svenska Fotobokspriset in 2022 and was exhibited at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin from April 1 to May 14, 2022. Lange, born in Gothenburg in 1984, previously published Another Language and The Mechanism with MACK, and Citizen with Études Books; he studied photography in Sweden, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and has shown at Foam, Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the Moderna Museet. For collectors attentive to Loose Joints’ list, this sits alongside their other tightly designed volumes. What earns it shelf space is the way Lange uses the grid less as a cage than as a diagnostic instrument.
Ghost Witness is an early, distinctively Chinese chapter in a practice that has ranged across nature, technology, and the built environment. The subject—urban life under conditions of continuous construction—remains with us. The photographs treat that condition without either nostalgia or alarm, and the result is a body of work durable enough that its questions have not expired.
