Nigel Baldacchino, The Only Distance, 2026

Work on this book began in 2022, from an exploratory edit of disparate photographs which held a common charge: one Baldacchino had long discerned traces of but had no words for, and was compelled by.
What the photographs held was a whole response, of the kind one has on re-entering a room where some pivotal event took place long before: broad in what it gathers, exact in how it is recognised. It could be identified from within instantly and still be hard to anchor, or to describe entirely, even to himself.
A couple of years of intermittent sitting with it, through the photographs and sequences he was working, made him more discerning about its specificities, until he began going back out to photograph “from” it. Within a year none of the photographs he had started with survived the working edit. What he had been looking for in the individual photograph had loosened into something he was looking for in the sequence.

This book was sponsored by the Biennale de la photographie de MulhouseThis book was sponsored by the Biennale de la photographie de Mulhouse.