Alisa Resnik’s One Another gathers photographs made mostly at night, in St Petersburg and Berlin, and published by Dewi Lewis in 2013 as a 120-page hardback. The book won that year’s European Publishers Award for Photography, a distinction attached to the project before most readers would have encountered it on a shelf. Its 67 colour plates keep to interiors and streets after dark: cafés, empty halls, old hotel rooms, faces caught mid-glance, hands reaching for something to hold. The palette stays leaden and close, and the sequencing lets one room rhyme with the next so that the two cities read as a single continuous night.

Resnik, born in Leningrad in 1976, moved to Berlin in 1990 and took up photography in 2008 after studying art history in Berlin and Bologna. That late start matters to how the pictures behave. She has described photography as a way of holding a moment long enough to see past the split between looking and being looked at — an act of perception, a search for a mirror. The sentences she writes around her own work are unusually plain, and the photographs answer them without illustration: the loneliness in them is specific, social, and observed rather than staged.

For a collection of this kind, the useful question is not how the images were made but what holds them together. Here it is tone and sequence, and to some degree the book itself — a tall, narrow hardback whose proportions suit vertical interiors and figures standing at thresholds. The European Publishers Award context also helps place it: the book belongs to a period when European publishers were consolidating serious photographic work in modest, well-made volumes, and Resnik’s contribution sits within that conversation rather than apart from it.

Anyone assembling a shelf around contemporary European night photography, or around photographers who emerged from the 2008–2013 award cycle, has reason to look closely at this one. It is a first book, tightly edited, and it shows a photographer working with an established grammar of the nocturnal city and finding her own temperature within it.