Two photographers approach a threatened tree species through landscapes separated by geography and by the timing of a disease. Paler Ash is a collaboration between Emanuel Cederqvist and Sean Gardiner, published by Blackbook Publications as a 136-page hardcover in Swedish and English. Both photographers are credited, and the book is jointly theirs; its structure rests on pairing and distance rather than a single authorial eye.

The subject is ash dieback, a fungal disease whose spread has put the future of the ash tree in question. Cederqvist and Gardiner photographed between Öland in Sweden, where the disease was reliably identified in 2003, and Dorset in England, where it was recorded a decade later. Those two sites sit at a relative east and west of the tree’s geographic range, and the book treats them as approximate mirrors: one place recalling a past the other has not yet reached, or a future the other may already inhabit.

The tone the project claims for itself is double. It is a document and an elegy at once, attentive to the presence of the trees it records while registering the absence that disease implies. Ash dieback’s origins remain unsettled, a compound of causes some arguably natural and others probably avoidable, and the book does not pretend to resolve that ambiguity. It lets the uncertainty sit inside the images.

The making of the object is considered rather than incidental. Eric Palmér designed it; Hans-Jacob Nilsson handled translation; the printing is 2+2 duotone hybrid offset. At 240 × 290 mm, the book brings photographs from the two regions into one physical sequence, with texts available in both languages.

For a collector, the draw is the pairing itself: two photographers working the same subject across two parts of its European range, building a book in which chronology and geography quietly argue with each other. Paler Ash was shortlisted for the Swedish Photobook Prize in 2026, and its ISBN is 9789198584592.