Paolo Ventura’s The Automaton takes its bearings from a story the photographer was told as a child. It unfolds in the Venice ghetto in 1943, during the Nazi occupation and the closing years of Fascist rule in Italy. An elderly Jewish watchmaker, alone in a city that has grown desolate and fearful, builds a mechanical figure to keep him company while he waits for the arrival of the fascist police. Dewi Lewis Publishing issued the book in 2012 as a hardback of 52 pages, with 22 colour plates and a format of 22 by 24 centimetres.

The book belongs to Ventura’s long-standing method rather than to documentary photography. He begins with a written narrative script, then constructs models and miniature figurines in the studio, arranges them into sets that resemble film stages, and photographs the resulting tableaux. What reaches the page is thus twice removed from the events it invokes: a photograph of a built world. Across the sequence, that layering suits the subject — a man who answers helplessness with fabrication.

The Automaton is a photographic narrative from beginning to end, and its continuity is carried by the images rather than by an accompanying text. The design of a short, generously scaled book allows the sequence to be read at a measured pace, with the constructed city and its solitary inhabitant held in view. The photographs were made during a period when Ventura’s work was being shown in Europe and the United States, including the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His earlier monographs, War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006) and Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), had already established the studio-built narrative as his territory.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in this sustained engagement with staged photography and in the completeness with which the story is told through pictures. It is a compact, carefully resolved volume in which construction, narrative, and photography are not separate activities but one continuous act. Read alongside Ventura’s other books, it clarifies how consistently he has worked at the boundary between the model and the photograph, and how deliberately he has used the book form to carry a story that could not be photographed directly.