Martine Stig’s *NEAR* begins with a camera that refuses to see as we do. Using a modified full-spectrum camera and a set of bandpass filters, Stig photographs her nearby environment in near-infrared and ultraviolet light—wavelengths outside ordinary human vision. Because the camera’s white-balance function cannot operate as designed, she substitutes random white-balance pre-sets. The resulting alien colours highlight the lack of standard or norm and reveal a slightly different reality.

Across 120 pages, *NEAR* gathers this work into a sequence. The subjects are often ordinary—the nearby environment, the kind of thing one might overlook—but the register is not simply documentary. Stig’s near-infrared and ultraviolet views convert the familiar into something estranged without leaving the realm of the observed. The book’s design supports that tension: a double-stitched softcover in a 16.5 x 23.5 cm format, printed with enhanced colours so that the images’ unnatural palette survives the page.

Published by Fw:Books, *NEAR* makes a technical procedure central to its photographic argument. Random white-balance settings refuse the reassurance of a single correct colour rendering. Instead, each image asks how much of the visible world depends on the instruments and conventions used to describe it. It is not a survey of her career but a focused body of work, and its coherence comes from the way the technical constraint—the impossible white balance—becomes a generative condition. For readers drawn to contemporary photography that tests the camera’s perceptual limits, this is a considered and distinctive addition.