In the 1920s the Belgian film manufacturer Gevaert let silver-bearing waste run into the Grensbeek, the border creek between Berchem and Mortsel. The sludge blackened the water and gave the stream its local names: Black Ditch, Silver Creek. From 1927 a toolmaker at the factory worked out how much metal was being washed away, drained the creek in secret, dried the residue and sent it to a metallurgical plant, recovering as much as half a ton of silver a year.

Lucas Leffler built Zilverbeek around that story, but not as a simple retelling. He gathered archives, newspaper clippings and historical documents, and photographed the factory and the waterway as they are now. He also took sludge from the creek bed and tested it for silver, repeating the pioneer’s gesture. The results became “mud prints,” made through darkroom printing; a reproduction of one is included as a poster.

Eriskay Connection issued the book in 2019 in a 36-page cahier format, 200 × 286 mm, with narrative construction shared by Leffler and Carel Fransen, who also designed it. Joy Phillips of The Language Collective handled translation and text editing. The English-language publication holds photographs, archival material and the mud prints in a single sequence, so the reader moves between industrial record, folklore and material experiment.

For collectors, the interest lies less in any claim of rarity than in how the project treats photography itself as part of an industrial and chemical history. Leffler’s prints are not illustrations of a found anecdote; they were produced from the same substance the anecdote turns on. A book that lets its own medium return as evidence, in a compact and carefully built edition, repays repeated looking.