Anderson & Low first came upon Victor, Colorado by chance some fifteen years before this book appeared, and the town’s hold on them never loosened. A gold strike in the early 1890s turned a stretch of isolated ranching country into a geological bonanza; Victor and nearby Cripple Creek swelled with more than eighteen thousand residents and the businesses that served them. The mines closed, the prospectors dispersed, and today roughly four hundred and fifty people remain. City Of Mines, published by Dewi Lewis in 2015, is the record of that stubborn afterlives.

The pictures move deliberately between scales. Expansive views of the surrounding landscape give way to architectural studies of surviving buildings and then to interiors, where the presence of former occupants is felt without a single figure being staged. Because the collaborators treat structures as their primary subject, the work keeps its distance from anecdote; what accumulates instead is the pressure of a place that seems to belong neither to the present nor entirely to the past. One hundred and twenty pages, with ninety-eight colour plates, give the sequence room to breathe, and the hardback format suits the formality of the looking.

Anderson & Low have worked together for more than a quarter century, known first for portraiture but long engaged with architecture and landscape as well. Their photographs are held by institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the national portrait galleries of the United Kingdom and Australia, and their work has been shown at the Venice Biennale. This project was exhibited in Colorado Springs in the autumn of 2015, the year of publication.

For a collector, the interest lies in how the book handles a familiar American subject without nostalgia or journalism. It is an elegy made of surfaces and rooms, and it rewards slow, repeated looking.