Compared to its larger Central African neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo has not been widely documented. Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin provide plenty of visual records in their book, Congo, which Aperture published in May, but they don’t seek to illuminate much, at least in terms of names, places, and historical context. Their photographs, a mix of captivating city scenes and tropical landscapes, are uncaptioned and untitled. An interview with Majoli over email yielded little more in the way of concrete information. Their goal, he said, was to leave viewers with only “what is necessary” to draw their own conclusions—namely, images—and nothing more.

Magnum photographers Paolo Pellegrin and Alex Majoli present a collaborative document of the Congo and its people. Bringing together the best of each photographer’s personal styles as well as experimental forays into abstraction and collage, this volume captures what Alain Mabanckou describes as a full range of the landscape, “from urban scenes to great forests and back, reflecting the way it is in most African societies today.” With no captions or individual photo credits, the densely printed images—presented on full-bleed pages, as gatefolds, or as double-spread gatefolds—become wholly immersive.

There are a lot of great pictures in the colossal new book “Congo” (Aperture, 2015), by the photographers Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin: pictures of immense panoramic scope and texture, pictures of deep, elaborate landscapes and of the human dramas that play out across them, scenes of labor, scenes of commerce, scenes of festivity, and scenes of tranquility, crowd scenes and portraits, interiors and exteriors, urban, rural, and wilderness, day and night, life and death.