Dan Dubowitz came to photography by way of architecture, and that training shows in how he looks at a city: not as a set of finished buildings but as a process that continuously produces and discards ground. Wastelands, published by Dewi Lewis in 2010, takes as its subject the neglected and abandoned sites that every city seems to hold somewhere — lots that fall quiet, structures left to weather, ground waiting to be reclassified. Dubowitz treats these places as evidence. What a society throws away, he suggests, is legible, and it tells you something about where that society is going.

His argument is not simply about decay. The wastelands in this book are fragile and temporary by nature, yet they keep reappearing; development clears one site and another opens elsewhere. What looks like an exception to the functioning city turns out to be a persistent feature of it. The book follows that contradiction across 106 colour plates, giving the subject room to accumulate rather than resolving it into a single statement. The square 290mm format and hardback binding give the sequence a steady, unhurried pace, closer to a survey than a portfolio of highlights.

Dubowitz is also a public arts consultant who has worked in the UK and Europe, and his earlier Dewi Lewis book, Fascismo Abbandonato, considered the Fascist-era children’s holiday centres of the northern Italian coast. Wastelands extends that interest in what regimes and economies leave standing after their purposes expire, though it keeps its focus on the contemporary city rather than a single historical episode.

For a collector, the point of interest is the coherence of the project: an architect’s eye brought to bear on terrain most photographers pass through rather than study, in a carefully produced 176-page edition from a publisher known for serious photographic books. It rewards attention as a sustained body of work about a condition of cities that has only become more familiar since 2010.