Ando, photographed by Nicola Nunziata, takes as its subject the Italian photographer Ando Gilardi (1921–2012). Rather than surveying Gilardi’s photographic output, it focuses on the places and workspaces Gilardi created and inhabited. The book is an index of photographic materials, personal artifacts and archival materials. Fw:Books presents it as an unbound book, held in a folder, framed as a work in progress.

The format follows from that approach. Loose sheets in a folder make the contents a set of records rather than a fixed sequence, and the book is explicitly positioned as unfinished. Fw:Books has issued the folder in five different colours, distributed randomly, so the outermost surface varies from copy to copy. The book measures 235 by 350 mm, runs 44 pages, and carries text in English and Italian. Its unbound, folder-contained state places it closer to a portfolio than to a conventional monograph.

Nunziata’s investigation centres on an archive: the book photographs the environment around Gilardi’s pictures — the workspaces, personal artifacts and accumulated papers — rather than illustrating the photographs themselves. The portrait is oblique by design.

For collectors, the interest lies in that doubled character: a document about a photographer’s environment, and an object whose unbound, folder-contained format makes it a deliberate exception to the bound photobook. The folder asks a reader to consider how a working environment becomes an archive, and how an archive becomes a book. Its loose structure keeps those stages visible instead of settling them into a closed account of a career.