Astres Noirs 2 brings together two photographers who have never shared a city, let alone a darkroom. Katrin Koenning, born in Dortmund and based in Naarm, Australia, and Sarker Protick, born in Dhaka, where he studied and now teaches, built this book as a correspondence of sorts, one conducted almost entirely through mobile phone cameras. What began as a daily, impulsive, at times obsessive form of note-taking became a body of black-and-white photographs made on doorsteps and far afield. Water stains on asphalt, a cloud of dust, a shaft of light: the raw material is nothing, and everything, depending on the eye that finds it.

The camera phone is not a gimmick here. It is the instrument of a shared temperament, allowing both photographers to work quickly, intimately, and without ceremony, and the results are elusive fragments that seem to hover between the documentary and the paranormal. A stain might read as a creature; a flare of light as a phosphorescent figure. Edited by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi and Vasantha Yogananthan and designed by Atelier Pentagon, the sequence lets those fragments accumulate into something stranger and more affecting than either body of work would be alone. The title’s black stars are not destinations but presences, glimpsed at the edge of what a lens can hold.

This is an early, defining project for both artists—their debut book, made in the first years of a dialogue that has since shaped each of their practices. It appears here in its second edition: 168 pages, 91 black-and-white photographs, a sewn hardcover at 16 by 22 centimeters, with French and English texts. For collectors drawn to the photobook as a collaborative form, and to the ways contemporary photographers test the limits of an everyday device, Astres Noirs 2 offers a considered, quietly ambitious example: two sensibilities, four hands, one enveloping dark.