In Myopia, Hillie de Rooij treats the European image of Africa as a subject in its own right. She began by gathering photographs of Africa from newspapers, magazines and websites across Europe, then catalogued the recurring devices through which the continent is made legible to distant readers: sand, wild animals, plastic, palm trees, drought, and other shorthand. That inventory became a set of instructions. De Rooij then photographed in the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and Norway, restaging the codes in European settings.

The resulting pictures tell us little about Africa and a great deal about the habits of looking that Europeans bring to it. The book’s structure follows this argument. It assembles three kinds of imagery—tourist, journalistic and artistic—and the publisher has matched each to its own paper stock and printing method, so that travel brochure, newsprint and art book are registered physically as distinct ways of framing a place.

De Rooij conceived the project and made the photographs; she edited it with Rob van Hoesel, who also designed the volume and, with NPN Printers, oversaw its printing. Jan Postma contributes an essay. Published by The Eriskay Connection in 2015, the book runs to 72 pages in a softcover with linen cap, at 200 by 270 mm.

For collectors drawn to photography that interrogates its own conventions, Myopia is a considered example of the medium used to examine perception rather than to supply it. Its subject is the coded vocabulary of representation, and its three-paper construction makes the book an argument in material form. It sits within a lineage of image-critique in European photobooks, and it rewards slow reading of how sequence and surface direct the eye.