The story of this book was built over time, through the many exchanges that took place between a photographer, the editors, graphic designers and authors.

Maxime Delvaux is best known for his commissioned photographs of contemporary buildings by architects such as Christian Kerez, Herzog & de Meuron, Bruther, Muoto, Baukunst and 51N4E. As a photographer, he also accompanies architects in the research process to design buildings and urban spaces, exhibitions and pedagogical experiments, as demonstrated by his long-lasting collaborations with Central ofaau and MBL architects. In this book, Delvaux pursues a more solitary trajectory, visiting buildings and sites which cover a much wider historical span and resonate with his personal fascinations.

The publication is structured around five photographic series, each devoted to a particular building, site or architect: Château de Chambord in France, Dilmun Burial Mounds in Bahrain, Jože Plečnik’s buildings in and around Ljubljana, Río Tinto in Spain, and Victor Horta’s Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels. It is, especially, a book of (hi)stories in which the series by Maxime Delvaux are accompanied by texts. For these, various authors have been invited to react to the images with the idea of experimenting with the text: fiction, historical essay, round-table discussion, scientific text and photonovel. Graphic designers playedwith text and images to give them form. The reader is in turn invited to create possible alliances between images and texts. Like Maxime Delvaux’s photographic approach, thesetexts and their articulation with the photographs are specific to each subject, illustrating five ways of showing andtelling about places near and far.

Co-published with Architecture Curating Practice and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (commercial publisher) and the support of the Flemish Government – Flanders State of the Art, and the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Architecture Unit.