In 2012 Stuart Whipps photographed Las Pozas, Edward James’s surrealist sculpture garden in Xilitla, Mexico, and the wooden moulds used to cast its structures. White Ashes Fell gathers those pictures: 28 colour plates on coated and uncoated papers, depicting a collection of 36 large concrete structures with titles such as The House with Three Stories That Could Be Five and The Temple of the Ducks. James, an English patron and poet, built Las Pozas between 1962 and 1979.

The photographs are not limited to the finished landmarks. By including the moulds used to cast James’s structures, Whipps attends to the labour and provisionality behind the surrealist enterprise, to the apparatus that precedes the monument. The result is a portrait of a place as much made as found.

The title comes from a story told to George Melly and published in Swans Reflecting Elephants, in which James recounts a snowfall in 1962 that destroyed his first horticultural plantings and led him to build things that could not be killed by snow.

Loose Joints published the book in May 2018 as a loop stapled booklet with a marbled cover, designed by James Langdon, at 210 by 270 millimetres and 44 pages. The making of these photographs was generously supported by Wysing Arts Centre. For collectors drawn to publication as a considered form, the book is notable for its sequence and design, and for its place in a body of work concerned with architecture and its afterlives.