Elias Holzknecht came to Micheldorf, a village of nearly six thousand in Upper Austria, almost by accident, while looking into the society he had grown up in. What he found was ordinary life — people sleeping, eating, walking, working — for whom this place is the centre of the world. The photographs that resulted are not a portrait of one community but of four: three other Micheldorfs share the name elsewhere in Austria, and Holzknecht’s project turns on that coincidence. The book’s title repeats the name four times, as if to insist that no single Micheldorf can stand for the rest.

The first impression is of a typological study, orderly and modernist, the kind of book that promises a legible account of a place. That impression is deliberately unsettled. The publication exists in several versions; each contains the same pictures and fragments of dialogue, but the sequence changes from copy to copy. Reading becomes a comparative act. What looks like a linear narrative is in fact one arrangement among others, and the reader is asked to notice how sequence itself produces meaning — how a photograph of a street or a face acquires a story through what precedes and follows it.

Carel Fransen edited the book with Holzknecht and designed it; the texts gather writing by Holzknecht, Georges Perec, Heinz Wagner, Johannes Karl Baedeker, Robert Musil and Wanda, with translations by Ben Lepesant and Nathalie Posch. The result is a book that thinks seriously about the limits of representing a social space, and about photography’s role in constructing the very places it claims to document.

For collectors, the interest lies in that conceptual framework and its execution: a first edition of 750 copies, 192 pages, bilingual in German and English, bound as an exposed selfcover with an American dust jacket and measuring 20 by 28 centimetres. It is a considered object as much as a body of pictures, and one that rewards slow, repeated looking.