Harvey Benge’s A Short History Of Photography begins with a small act of misreading. Sorting through his contact sheets, Benge kept noticing that one frame recalled a Friedlander, another a Parr, another a Baltz. Most photographers treat such echoes as grounds for rejection. Benge did the reverse, gathering the pictures into what Gerry Badger calls an anthology of contemporary photography populated by some of its most familiar names — except that every photograph in it is a genuine Benge.

Published by Dewi Lewis in 2007, the book runs to eighty-eight pages and forty photographs, introduced by Badger, the critic and co-author, with Martin Parr, of The Photobook: A History. Badger’s framing matters: he treats the project as both game and argument, a light-hearted and entirely serious inquiry into how photographic style is made, borrowed, and remade. The echoes are meant to be noticed, but the pictures are not pastiches; they are strong photographs that happen to brush against other people’s signatures.

What distinguishes the volume is the discipline of its premise. Imitation is usually where a photographer’s eye goes slack; here it becomes a method of looking, and the sequence lets us watch Benge test his own habits against the styles he admires. Badger, who has written on Atget, Chris Killip, and the practice of collecting photographs, is well placed to weigh what the game yields, and his introduction keeps the tone exact — wry where the conceit is wry, exacting where the pictures demand it.

Benge, a New Zealander working between Auckland and Paris, had already published more than a dozen books when this one appeared, and the project belongs to that longer conversation between his work and the medium’s history. For collectors, its interest is structural rather than speculative: a compact, considered book in which an established photographer stages an argument about influence and originality, and in which an anthology of admired names turns out to be one photographer’s own. Read it as a self-portrait assembled out of other people’s shadows.