Peter Pflügler’s Now is not the right time begins with a sentence that refuses consolation: when he was two, his father walked into the woods intending not to return. The attempt was hidden from the family for two decades, though Pflügler writes that he somehow always knew. Published by Eriskay Connection in 2023, this 112-page hardcover makes that withheld knowledge its true subject — not as anecdote but as a study of how silence travels between generations, what a family shares precisely by concealing, and how love can be the instrument of harm.

The photographs and Pflügler’s own texts sit on what the publisher calls the brink between comfort and irritation, and the book’s design by Sybren Kuiper (SYB) enacts that instability. Its uncut signatures ask the reader to slit the pages open, so that reading becomes an act of gradual disclosure; texts and images tucked between leaves reward that labor and withhold it at the same time. Editing by Xiomara van Eendenburg and Danit Ariel shapes the material without smoothing its discomfort, letting the sequence move by association and return rather than argument.

For collectors, the interest lies in this congruence of theme and artifact. A book about the impossibility of secrets is built to release its contents only slowly, and Kuiper’s structure is the argument, not a container for it. Photobooks that treat inherited trauma often settle for illustration; this one keeps the family’s guardedness in its form, and its restraint is the point. Pflügler, working from Austria, sustains tenderness toward people who caused pain, which is harder and rarer than accusation.

It deserves attention as a considered object by a photographer who is also the book’s author, made with named editors and a designer whose interventions can be read rather than merely noticed. Shelve it beside work that treats the family archive as an ethical problem rather than a source of ready sentiment.