Jaya Pelupessy treats the photograph as a stage rather than a window. In *Set-Put-Run*, published by Fw:Books in 2016, he examines how an image comes into being and how that process shapes what the finished picture can mean. His question is not simply what a photograph shows, but whether making the apparatus visible — the setups, repetitions, and mechanical decisions behind every frame — strengthens the image, cancels it out, or produces a different kind of autonomy altogether.

The book turns that inquiry on its own manufacture. Working with graphic designer Hans Gremmen, Pelupessy takes the production of the volume as his subject, using five cameras and immediate processing to build pages whose layers accumulate without being fully reconciled. The result is a document that behaves like a feedback loop: reproductions are reproduced again, and the boundary between the depicted subject and the means of depiction keeps shifting. Simon Winchester contributes an essay on the three verbs of the title, tracing how ‘set’, ‘put’, and ‘run’ carry an unusual density of meanings in English — an apt textual counterpart to Pelupessy’s interest in how a single act of framing can hold several incompatible states at once.

The physical book is not incidental to this argument. At 24 by 34 centimetres and 128 pages, it includes 64 pages in Japanese binding, a construction that interrupts the usual flow of turning pages and makes the reader aware of the book as an assembled object. Colour reproductions run throughout. The edition was named among *de Volkskrant*’s Best of 2016.

For collectors, the appeal lies in the coherence of concept and form. This is a photobook in which design, binding, and photographic research are not separate contributions but one continuous argument about reproduction and control — a distinctive entry in the recent history of the medium examining its own conditions.