The book brings together more than ninety still lifes, portraits and landscapes created by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, combining newly commissioned work produced along the south coast of England with images made in other international contexts. The sequence explores the relationships between photography, imperial history and the colonial drive to classify, map and collect the world.

Through their practice, the artists reflect on the position of the documentary photographer as a contemporary inheritor of the collector-explorer figure. The images assembled here function as fragments of evidence and interpretation, deliberately blurring the boundary between observation and construction. What emerges is a tension between factual record and imaginative projection, where photography becomes both testimony and invention.

Accompanied by an essay by art historian Julian Stallabrass, the publication situates these visual investigations within broader debates on image-making, power and historical representation.