Nazraeli Press numbered this title 78 in its One Picture Book series, and the number matters: it locates a compact, finite object rather than a survey. The photographer is Melanie Pullen. Across sixteen hardcover pages the book carries an original photograph together with a group of plates, presenting a series Pullen made in Los Angeles in 2004 with Juliette Lewis as its central figure. Lewis is not cast as a victim but as a female perpetrator, a femme fatale conceived as fantasy rather than reportage. Pullen has said she wrote scripts for each shot and that Lewis acted them out, so that every image functions as a film still, the only one of its scene.

That reversal gives the work its pressure. Pullen’s earlier High Fashion Crime Scenes looked at the victim and stayed close to reality; Juliette moves the model into a position of power and into deliberate fiction. The photographs are staged portraits that borrow cinema’s grammar, with Lewis as muse and protagonist, and they sit between portraiture and narrative. A small book suits the scale of a held film still.

The tipped-in original photograph changes the character of the object. It makes the publication at once a reading copy and a print, which is the particular appeal of this series as Nazraeli conceived it: an artist’s idea given concentrated book form, with one original work bound in. For a collector, that combination is the point of attention. The plates establish the atmosphere of the series; the original print makes this copy a multiple as well as a book.

Pullen works at a deliberate remove from documentary. An actress, a script and the look of a film still are used to construct a female figure who is dangerous and self-possessed. This title preserves that project in a form that is neither a portfolio nor a conventional monograph, and its numbered place in the series makes it specific and bounded. The book’s interest lies in that containment.