Martine Stig made the photographs in Noir on the streets of Amsterdam between 2014 and 2016. What she brought back is not reportage. Working candidly and often at a distance, she frames passers-by so that they read as protagonists in a film that has no plot: figures caught mid-motion, held at the edge of legibility, surrounded by the mise-en-scène of an ordinary city. The light is hard and the mood is unsettled, and the title points less to a palette than to a cinematic register — the long lens and film noir. Stig’s larger inquiry, pursued across earlier and later work, concerns photography’s role in shaping what we take to be real.

The book’s real subject, though, may be the space between pictures. Each spread is built as a 2 x 2 grid ruled by white lines; one to four cells carry an image, and the remaining cells stay empty. Turn a page and the blanks register as forcefully as the photographs. Normally invisible connective tissue — the assumptions and jumps a viewer supplies — is here given physical form, so that the gaps stop being absences and become intervals. As Daria Tuminas asks in her accompanying text, do such ruptures divide the sequence or bind it? Do they exist to be crossed, or are they things in themselves?

Hans Gremmen designed the volume at pocket size, 13.5 by 20.5 centimeters, with 144 pages in tritone. The scale invites holding and close looking, and the three-tone printing keeps the hard light of the source images without letting them settle into a comfortable documentary tone. Design and sequence are not packaging here; they are the argument.

Fw:Books published Noir in 2016. For collectors of photobooks in which editing and bookmaking carry conceptual weight — work that treats the page as a problem rather than a container — this is a considered example, and one that rewards being read spread by spread, at the pace its blanks demand.