Lars Duchateau’s Limburg takes as its starting point a run of reports from the regional pages of Het Belang van Limburg, the newspaper of a rural corner of north-eastern Belgium, printed between November 2019 and October 2023. The stories are ordinary to the point of vanishing: hundreds of mushrooms appearing overnight, a court case against a peeping Tom, three women stranded in a swamp, a wedding ring recovered after years. Largely unillustrated, or filled with generic stock images, such items were never meant to be looked at.

Duchateau decided to make the pictures they lacked. Working in medium and large format, he returned to these events weeks, months, sometimes a year afterward, building images that are large, calm, and deliberately slow, their detail accumulated rather than seized. Set beside the short original texts, which tend to ask more than they explain, the photographs do not report; they hold the facts at arm’s length and let weight gather quietly around them.

The book gives the minor incident a stage it rarely receives. What emerges is a study in proportion: the photographic attention paid to a lost ring or a flooded field is out of all scale with the news value of the event, and that mismatch is precisely the argument. Amira Prescott designed the 128-page volume, published by Eriskay Connection in Dutch and English, across 230 × 310 mm pages.

For a collection, the interest lies in how deliberately Duchateau’s approach sits apart from the documentary habits that might have claimed this material. Where a regional newspaper must compress, he expands; where the story asks for an image, he withholds one long enough to make it count. The result is a substantial, restrained work by a photographer thinking carefully about the relationship between news and attention.