Cape Town holds its histories in the ground itself, and in *And Then* Bharat Sikka photographs the city as a place where beauty and silence occupy the same frame. Published by Fw:Books in 2024, the book gathers work made in the quieter spaces of the city and along its coast, where landscape carries the residue of memory and the sea breeze keeps a certain lightness in play. Sikka’s approach is patient rather than declarative; the images listen for what a place will not say outright.

What distinguishes the project is its insistence on atmosphere over argument. The publisher describes *And Then* as a delicate dance between landscape and memory, in which the land seems to whisper of untold stories and the photographs invite us to see beyond the surface. Rather than illustrate a history of Cape Town, the images dwell in the tension between what is visible and what is withheld, letting land and water carry beauty and silence at once. Read this way, the book invites attention to how a landscape activates memory and how a photograph can make unspoken experience felt, without asking the sequence to serve as an exhaustive account of the city.

The book is a compact, carefully considered object: 136 pages, 23.5 by 28 centimetres, in an open-spine softcover binding printed and bound in India. The format suits the work’s restraint, allowing sequences to breathe and individual images to hold the page without ornament.

For collectors, the case for *And Then* rests on the coherence of a serious photographer’s practice and on a body of work that treats a complex city with formal discipline. It sits beside Sikka’s other long-form projects as a considered chapter in an ongoing inquiry into landscape, memory and place.