Elaine Ling came to Habitación Cubana at the end of a life spent moving between medicine and photography, backpacking a view camera through deserts and practicing family medicine from northern Canada to Abu Dhabi and Nepal. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, she died in August 2016; this book, her contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, was among her last projects. Its subject is Cuba, seen on two separate trips, in 2002 and again in 2015.

The structure is exact and unusual. Seven pairs of photographs, each pair presenting a chosen subject first in black and white, then thirteen years later in color. The result is a set of diptychs in which time and color become the real materials: a room, a wall, a piece of furniture returns changed, and the viewer reads the interval between the frames rather than either image alone. The black-and-white frame records; the color frame reopens the question. Because the pairing is consistent across the book, the repetitions accumulate, and the sequencing itself becomes the argument.

The book is a hardcover of 16 pages, with seven duotone plates, six four-color plates, and, replacing the final reproduction, one original signed color photograph. That print is integral to the object, not a supplement: the last pair is completed by the print rather than a plate. For a collector, this is the point at which the edition becomes a photographic work as much as a book, and it is also why the volume is closely identified with Ling’s late practice. Her photographs are held by institutions including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a context that places this small book within a substantial body of work. The invitation here is not scale but concentration: seven subjects, thirteen years, and the shift from gray to color, held in the hand.