Nazraeli Press issued Elemental Forms in 2022 as the thirty-third title in its One Picture Book Two series. The photographer is Nadezda Nikolova, whose practice is camera-less: she works in the darkroom with light, wet-plate collodion chemistry, paper cut-outs, cliché verre, and brushes, building compositions through multiple exposures. The resulting images allude to landscape, to light and atmospheric phenomena, and to organic forms while refusing to settle into straightforward description.

That refusal is the book’s subject. Nikolova’s pared-down vocabulary sits between representation and abstraction, and the photogram’s immediacy connects the work to painting, collage, graphic arts, and sculpture. Across twelve duotone plates, shape, artifact, gesture, and tonal range carry the compositions; moods shift from contemplative stillness to movement and dynamism as the artist tests balance and rhythm. The sequence reads as an inquiry into how form behaves under light rather than as a record of places.

The book appears in a format the series has made familiar: hardcover, sixteen pages, roughly six by eight and a half inches, with a signed original photograph included. Each copy is numbered within an edition of five hundred. For collectors, the print is integral rather than incidental, and the pairing of a compact sequence with a physical original lets the darkroom process be held alongside its reproduction.

Nikolova’s background adds a distinct layer. Born in 1978 in the former Yugoslavia, she studied nineteenth-century phototrophic printing processes at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum, and she holds degrees in natural resources and environmental science and in policy analysis and administration. That scientific and technical formation informs a body of work exhibited and collected internationally, and it gives this small, concentrated volume its particular weight: an exacting process, a restrained selection of images, and a form that keeps the hand and the chemistry present.