Bettina Rheims/Serge Bramly. Rose - c'est Paris, Art Edition No. 101–200 'Magic'

Somewhere around the third costume change, with the twin heroines lost again in a mirrored corridor of a Paris that exists mostly in Serge Bramly's head, the ambition of 'Rose - c'est Paris' begins to outrun the patience it asks of you. This is a photographic novel with a plot you are meant to work at: a labyrinth of surrealist references, doubles, and half-dreams that does not much care whether you keep pace. Rheims supplies the images, Bramly the enveloping fiction, and the two have been circling this territory together since 'Chambre Close.'

Is the story actually decipherable, or is the opacity the entire design? The project was conceived on a grand scale, a book paired with a feature film shown at the Bibliothèque nationale, thick with nods to noir, to the city, and to the surrealists' love of coincidence and disguise. The narrative trails two sisters through a sequence of tableaux, and the connective tissue between them is deliberately, sometimes maddeningly, loose. Its admirers call the effect hypnotic. The less forgiving call it an expensive private joke dressed for the camera.

What is never in doubt is the surface. Rheims photographs like the exacting image-controller she has always been, every set dressed to the final prop, every body lit with her cold, precise glamour. Individual plates are stunning in isolation, and the eroticism keeps her characteristic poise, sensual without sliding into the cheap. The difficulty is that the plates are hostages to the conceit; lifted out of the narrative they breathe, bound inside it they start to read as production stills for a film whose script you were never handed.

There is a real audience for exactly this, and it is not a foolish one. A photographer who loves world-building, who sequences a shoot like a story and thinks about the whole folder rather than the single frame, will find a great deal here to study about set, continuity, and controlled palette. It is easy to forget how the work was meant to be seen: 'Rose - c'est Paris' was an exhibition and a film before it was a volume on a coffee table, and the still book is in some sense a souvenir of a larger event you did not attend. That helps explain both its density and its occasional airlessness on the page.

Picture the two editions side by side on a shelf. The photographs inside them are identical; what the premium bought is the print in the sleeve and the number on the colophon. The signed, numbered silver gelatine print that ships with this run is a genuine object, and the collectors it courts know precisely what they are paying for. For a committed Rheims collector, that is reason enough and always will be. For someone who came looking for a working reference on staging and light, the standard edition hands over every image and spares you the surcharge on a story that may never fully resolve.