In 2009, Dieuwertje Komen visited medium-sized European cities that had applied to become the European Capital of Culture, among them Bordeaux, Kosice, Pilzn and Mons. She was commissioned by the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam to photograph these applicant cities. Instead of grouping images by location, Komen shuffled them, so that the sequence moves without regard for municipal borders or arrival and departure. The resulting book, Commonness, proposes a composite portrait of the mid-sized city today, one in which specific places yield to recurring conditions: recurring urban forms and the textures of civic life.

Fw:Books issued the volume in 2009 with a text by Martino Tattara. The publisher describes Komen’s method as random arrangement serving as a deliberate compositional principle, turning the book into a tour that constantly changes: it is not confined to a single city, but says something about the urban situation in medium-sized European cities today. That structure prevents any single city from becoming exemplary and asks the reader to compare, to notice what persists across different national contexts. The loose-leaf binding, together with the modest page count and 21 by 27 centimetre format, gives the object a provisional, working quality, as if the sequence could be reshuffled again.

For a collector, Commonness is significant less for trophy status than for its lucid demonstration of a problem that occupied European photography and urbanism in the late 2000s: how to picture the ordinary city without either celebrating or diagnosing it. Komen’s answer is procedural and restrained. The book belongs to a line of conceptual documentary projects that use editing and sequencing as primary tools, and its makers—Komen and Tattara—are active participants in that conversation. Its quietness is precisely what makes it worth returning to.