The first thing a reader meets in JJ VFF VV is not a photograph. The cover carries a drawing by Valentín, the son whose arrival the book records — now eleven, and aware of what his parents made. It is a quiet way into a book that is otherwise unusually direct: a pregnancy followed through its difficult course, from the rooms of a home into hospital wards, and on into the first days of a life.

João Linneu photographs his partner, Fernanda Fajardo, through that passage — her body changing, the intimacy of bedroom and bathroom, clinical interiors, the flat light of waiting. Fajardo photographs as well. Her self-portraits, made during her hospitalisation, and her occasional portraits of Linneu interrupt and answer his gaze, so the book is less a record of a subject than an exchange between two people each holding a camera. Neither position, watched or watching, is allowed to settle.

The circumstances give the work its edge. Much of it was made under the constraints of a paediatric intensive care unit where photography was not permitted, and the book became a way of insisting on representation where it had been refused. Pain and joy are not sorted into separate chapters but left side by side on the same spread, which is the harder arrangement to sustain.

Void has given the material a substantial, deliberate object: 416 pages in colour and black and white, 16 by 24 centimetres, an English-language paperback issued in a run of 500 copies. The page count matters. A sequence this long allows the slow accumulation the subject demands, and the three-way authorship — his pictures, hers, their son’s drawing at the door — is uncommon in a photobook of this kind. Published in 2026, it appears among the selections for that year’s Prix du Livre Paris Photo – Fondation Aperture.

For a collector, the argument rests less on scarcity than on the object itself: a sustained, collaborative account of childbirth and its complications, made from inside a family and composed with restraint.