Tito Mouraz’s Fluvial takes as its subject the riverside beaches of northern and central inland Portugal — places the photographer has known since childhood. The book is not documentary reportage so much as a slow transformation of that personal geography into something dreamlike. Across its pages, the river and the people who gather at its edge are rendered with unusual attention to form: bodies half-submerged, tree trunks, and riverbed rocks begin to read as sculpture, while the water’s surface acts almost as an optical instrument that bends and simplifies what it holds.

The prevailing mood is one of leisure — informal moments of family and community life at the water’s edge — but Mouraz’s gaze is neither ironic nor detached. The images carry a gentleness toward their subjects and a sustained fascination with analogy, producing what the publisher describes as the atmosphere of an infinite Sunday, realistic yet dreamlike.

Fluvial is a hardback volume of 120 pages with 72 colour plates, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2019. Its generous landscape format — 31 by 25 centimetres — allows the sequences of light and water to breathe, and the book’s sequencing matters as much as any single frame: the recurring return to submerged bodies and rounded stones builds a quiet, cumulative rhythm.

This is Mouraz’s second book with Dewi Lewis, following The House of the Seven Women. For collectors already attuned to contemporary European photography, Fluvial is a considered example of how a personal, regional subject can be shaped into an extended visual meditation — not through spectacle, but through patience, tone, and an eye for the sculptural in the everyday.