Book Review Dogbreath Photographs by Matthew Genitempo Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Matthew Genitempo’s method has always relied on intuition. He approaches photo projects with no clear finish line in mind. Instead he settles in somewhere and pokes around, secure in the faith that his gut will lead him to photographs..."

Dogbreath by Matthew Genitempo.

Dogbreath
Photographs by Matthew Genitempo
Trespasser, Austin, 2024. 108 pp., 55 tritone plates, 11½x15".

Matthew Genitempo’s method has always relied on intuition. He approaches photo projects with no clear finish line in mind. Instead he settles in somewhere and pokes around, secure in the faith that his gut will lead him to photographs. Gradually he learns the lay of the land and meets a few locals. One thing leads to another. Acquaintances string together, rhythms flex, and passing moments deepen into portrait sessions. After a while he’s got a book.

This process served Genitempo well for his 2019 debut monograph Jasper, set in the Ozark Mountains, and the 2022 follow-up Mother of Dogs, based in Marfa, Texas. So it’s not surprising he would use the same method for the successor. His third book, Dogbreath, finds him wandering the nether regions of Tucson, Arizona. The project actually predates Mother of Dogs, but its production timeline was scrambled by Covid and some personal moves. Still, he never lost the thread. Somewhere along the way his Tucson photos became entwined with a series of old television screenshots. The resulting hybrid feels both contemporary and wistful.

One more thing: Dogbreath is huge. At 15 inches in height, it sprawls like Tucson. The oversized tome comes in a random selection of three cover tints. It may not be suited for conventional bookshelves, but its wide pages provide a nice laboratory for varied layouts. Monochrome photos come in mixed sizes. Placements bounce around the pages, generally hewing to center. They’re sequenced one or two per spread, like saguaros across the mesa.

Dogbreath describes a sun scorched, forlorn place. It is by turns spacious, chain linked, rocky, and guarded by dogs. On occasion Genitempo’s camera alights on a bored looking adolescent boy. These bedraggled characters offer animated relief from the bleak landscape, but just barely. Many look parched and put upon themselves, as if they might melt back into a nearby gravel wash or rock wall. Their mood is blank, almost reptilian, and not entirely different than the characters in Jasper. Did Genitempo catch Tucson during the mid-summer doldrums? Or else in the deep sloth of winter? Or perhaps this is just his natural portrait voice? With no captions or supporting information, the precise ingredients aren’t clear. But it’s certain you won’t find Dogbreath hyped at the local travel bureau.

Like his search process, Genitempo’s compositional style is also rooted in intuition. Unlike his Trespasser stable mate Bryan Schutmaat — whose photos tend toward classical motifs — Genitempo comes at the reader from unlikely angles. He typically captures subjects from the side or obscured by foreground, and he crops with dissonant zeal. In one photo, a stop sign octagon is chopped off at the legs. In another, the edge of a boy’s portrait runs right through his eyeball. The gap behind a small house runs awkwardly through some unfocused foreground, perhaps spider webs or branches? In a shot of a convenience store, the bottom quarter of the frame is devoted to a misplaced boulder.

What exactly is going on here? Considered on their own, any of these examples might seem like careless mistakes. But after seeing Genitempo doing it time and again, they take on voice and currency. If his vision is slightly skewed, that’s fine. He’s just trespassing to a different drummer. Not so easy to do in a world swimming in photographs.

The photos are occasionally interspersed with typewritten texts. They refer to a boy named Dove, to whom the book is dedicated. He is interested in guns, copper, and turning a quick buck. Each passage offers a brief peek into his world, but the messages are cryptic and it’s unclear if Dove is a subject in the book, or how exactly he relates to the photographs. He might be a Tucson local, an invented character, or a figure from Genitempo’s screenshots. As with Jasper and Mother of Dogs, the narrative is murky — maybe even disjointed? — but it somehow holds together. Dove propels the reader through the Tucson underbelly. Depending on the day or mood, it might be rock hard, or warm and fuzzy like a TV screen.

As with all Trespasser books, Dogbreath is beautifully printed and bound. The text passages are a perfect facsimile of an old manual typewriter. The photo reproductions are richly layered on matte paper, with tones clustered in the middle ranges. Heck, even the glitchy old screenshots look lush and attractive. The whole thing almost belongs on a book-making pedestal. It’s the latest testament to this young publisher’s acumen, whose production chops seem to grow with each title. If Trespasser’s finery operates in inverse relation to its prosaic subjects, well, intuition makes for strange bedfellows.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Blind Spot Photographs by Julie van der Vaart Reviewed by Madeline Cass "In Blind Spot, Julie van der Vaart crafts images that drift between the abstract and the tactile, the geological and the human. The silvery prints are a study in contrast — both visually and conceptually..."

Blind Spot by Julie van der Vaart.

Blind Spot
Photographs by Julie van der Vaart

Void, Athens, Greece 2023. 220 pp., 7¾x9¾".

In Blind Spot, Julie van der Vaart crafts images that drift between the abstract and the tactile, the geological and the human. The silvery prints are a study in contrast — both visually and conceptually. Over- and underexposed moments create a dreamlike experience that invites viewers into her world of chiaroscuro. The viewer questions not only the nature of our bodies but also how far are we actually removed from the slow drip of time — like stalactites we are shaped by small moments. We are reminded that time is not intuitive but merely moments strung together (much like the function of the camera itself) where seemingly abstract ideas are merged into one continuous loop. The question is this: are we truly outside the natural processes of the earth, of caves, of the slow drip of water within us all? She seems to answer: we are not. This work invites the viewer to look deeper than the skin, this crust of society we are all mired in.

Van der Vaart’s work is visceral, marked by drips, sprays, and textures that resemble acid washes or misty, stormy coastlines. Often, the imagery of bodies alongside caves evokes topographic or geological maps and visually drags us across landscapes both human and subterranean.

The imagery of people highlights humanity’s vulnerability through disassociation of not only body but place, and questions the mystery and solitude found in life. The nudes that are paired with these natural landscapes feel like echoes, their shapes abstracted into formal structures, eliciting the viewer to explore and climb in. Limbs become rivers, and bodies float like celestial objects, at times resembling the moon or stars in motion. There’s a tension here between bodies falling or arching, offering an emotional push-pull between desire and detachment.

The subtle use of color — hints of purples and blues — breaks through the monochrome, allowing for moments of stillness, like musical rests between visual notes. Van der Vaart’s repetition of forms and exposures creates a rhythm that builds, referencing both geological forces and bodily ones. In one double-page spread, the deep blue evokes Yves Klein, while elsewhere, a body and a cave meld together in a shared sense of space and form.

Van der Vaart’s work questions the boundaries of the known and the unknown — inviting us to spelunk through both physical landscapes and emotional depths. Her visual metaphors are provocative, at times playful. Through seeming imperfections, motion blurs, and long exposures, she taps into early photographic techniques, while pushing them into contemporary contexts.

Blind Spot is a journey of texture, shape, and light. Through its inky depths, we are invited to explore not only the natural world but the deeply personal and emotional spaces within ourselves. The experience of looking at these images is as much about what we see as what remains in the periphery — an invitation to uncover and understand our own blind spots.

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mad(eline) cass is an American artist and photographer based in Lincoln, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri. She is the author of how lonely, to be a marsh, published in 2019.

Book Review This Earthen Door By Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey Reviewed by Cheryl Van Hooven “Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s This Earthen Door is a creation of stunning beauty and reverence — reverence for Emily Dickinson and her love of flowers and poetry, and, more generally, reverence for the natural world..."

This Earthen Door. By Amanda Marchand 

& Leah Sobsey. 

This Earthen Door
By Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey
Datz Press, Seoul, Korea, 2024. 128 pp., 8¼x10½".

Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s This Earthen Door is a creation of stunning beauty and reverence — reverence for Emily Dickinson and her love of flowers and poetry, and, more generally, reverence for the natural world.

Using digital scans from a facsimile edition of Dickinson’s mid-19th century herbarium, the original too fragile to be taken from dark storage at Harvard’s Houghton Library, their imaginative reinterpretation of this work is a collaborative synergy of photography, poetry, art, botany and bookmaking.

There are many ways to approach This Earthen Door: as an inventive engagement with Dickinson’s own 66-page herbarium; as an immensely original artists book; as an introduction to the Victorian pastime of botanical pressings; as a reevaluation and further resurrection of the feminine in early photography; and, most assuredly, as pure visual pleasure — but all the while noting the underpinnings of conceptual depth and breadth that carry Marchand’s and Sobsey’s effort into another realm.

Considering This Earthen Door through the lens of ecofeminism (“a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections and the merits of intuition and collaboration”*), one sees the deep connections between Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s three year immersion into the world of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium with the alchemy of plant emulsions, collaborative research and practice.

Asked about the spark that led to This Earthen Door, Marchand and Sobsey said they had long wanted to collaborate on a feminist project, and in their discussions during the Covid pandemic, together arrived on Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. With a background in literature, Marchand said she was interested in bringing the literary world, specifically poetry, into her artwork. Sobsey, on the other hand, has had a long and rich history working with archives, and this Dickinson archive seemed a natural choice for her.

Referencing mid-19th century photography, Marchand and Sobsey used the historic anthotype process of applying plant-based extracts to paper and then exposing that paper to sunlight with a photographic negative on top. The resulting images, while beautiful, are fugitive, and after being scanned for prints and reproduction, are now also kept in the dark.

With self-imposed rules and structure, detailed notes and charts, and partnering with experts in both botany and Dickinson herbarium studies, Marchand’s and Sobsey’s methodology and documentation mirrored Dickinson’s own rigor of method, which had elevated her herbarium to scientific research, botany, affording one of the few avenues of scientific study open to American Victorian women.

Determined to stay as close to the flowers in Dickinson’s botanical work as possible, they chose 66 specimens of the over 400 in the original herbarium, one for each of Dickinson’s 66 pages.

Marchand and Sobsey grew most of their own flowers and plants or collected them on walks just as the poet did, choosing plants in Dickinson’s herbarium that were crossovers to their own gardens in Quebec and North Carolina. It was those flowers that provided the plant-based emulsions used in the anthotypes and chromotaxia, their color taxonomy.

This Earthen Door is a gorgeous book whose every element is considered for beauty and knowledge. Upon opening the book’s cover, the reader encounters 13 separate and brilliantly colored pages washed with plant pigment emulsions, ready-for-exposure. Younghea Kim, Datz designer, and Sangyon Joo, Director, suggested putting each color sheet on its own unique paper stock whose somewhat raspy and unforgettable tactility is carried in finger memory as one reaches the smooth interior pages. Even as I type this, I remember the surprise of the papers’ textures on my fingertips.

Following the full color pages are the 66 stunning color plates of the anthotype interpretations of Dickinson’s herbarium, some of which bear notations in Dickinson’s own hand. To say they are vibrant and alive and seductive is to understate their impact. The plates not only carry the reproductions of flowers but are themselves composed of organic matter.

Literally bookending the plates, eleven additional full color pages appear at the back, adding to one’s retinal memory long after the cover is closed.

Inserted within This Earthen Door is another pleasure, Bloom – is Result, a second smaller booklet generously sharing process information, the anthotype timing chart, a color wheel and the description of additional work done during the Datz Museum of Art residency. As one more gift to the reader, there is a small piece of handmade paper embedded with wildflower seeds to plant with Dickinson’s poem, ‘To make a prairie’.

The Korean translations interspersed throughout speak both to Emily Dickinson’s international following and respect for Hangul, the beautifully graphic writing system of the publisher’s home country.

Ghost Flowers, an essay by Dickinson scholar, Marta Werner, underscores the poetry of time travel in this conversation between Amanda Marchand, Leah Sobsey. “Are they images of the herbarium’s lost memories of the vernal earth of more than a century ago? Or are they after-images from the herbarium’s dream of a world to come. . .”

Throughout much of human history, women have carried the herbal knowledge of a culture or community, and despite being denied access into most of academe and scientific societies, brilliant and intrepid Victorian women found ways to research and practice in scientific fields, eventually gaining the acknowledgment and respect of their colleagues.

Marchand and Sobsey, in their research and investigations, came upon Mary Somerville, a Scottish polymath for whom the designation ‘scientist’ was created. There is some dispute as to whether she or her colleague John Herschel was the first to discover the use of vegetable matter in creating photographs through the anthotype process, but there is no doubt that she was part of the flourishing and exciting early discoveries within photography during themid-19th century. At the same time, Anna Atkins, having learned the cyanotype process from Herschel made her celebrated seaweed photograms and is the first person to publish a book with photographic images. Although Atkins, Somerville, and Herschel were contemporaries of Dickinson, it’s unknown whether she knew of their work, but she, too, through the study of botany made her way into scientific exploration.

As creative descendants of Atkins and Somerville, Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey are of the lineage of women artists working with nature and photography in an alchemical vein, and it’s more than fitting that their ravishing book is inspired by and pays homage to the proto-ecofeminist Emily Dickinson.

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*Britannica

Cheryl Van Hooven is a photographer and writer based in New York and often working in the California Mojave Desert. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, Imagery Estate Winery Permanent Collection at Sonoma State University, among others. She is currently working on a photo/text book.

Book Review Manifest | Thirteen Colonies Photographs by Wendel A. White Reviewed by Brian Arnold "Thinking about Zora Neale Hurston is a great entry for looking at the new work by photographer and academic Wendel A. White, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies. Like Hurston, Wendel developed his work with both the discipline and insight of an academic anthropologist and the skill and wisdom of an artist (some histories are better told in metaphors)..."

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies. By Wendel A. White.

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies
Photographs by Wendel A. White

Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM, 2024. 298 pp., 235 images, 9½x11¾".

“Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old. Wouldn’t have found out then, but a man come long takin’ pictures and without askin’ anybody, Shelby, dat was the old boy, he told him to take us. Round a week later de man brought de picture for Mis’ Whasburn to see and pay him…

“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast,’where is me? Ah don’t see me?’

“Everybody laughed…Mis Nellie, de Mama of de cillun who come back after her husband dead, she pointed to de dark one and, ‘Dat’s you Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?’

“Dey used to call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at the picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said:

“’Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’

“Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Memoir and poems of Phillis Wheatley, a native African and slave, 1834. Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA. By Wendel A. White

It’s safe to say Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a major literary accomplishment, a work whose merits are well understood and defined within the traditions of American literature. Despite that, I think Hurston is an underacknowledged writer and intellectual. After studying at Howard University, she received a scholarship to study Anthropology at Barnard with acclaimed professor Franz Boas. This was unprecedented, given that she started her graduate studies in 1925. After Barnard, in 1928, she continued her graduate studies at Columbia University, where she developed her field work on folklore in South Florida. In addition to her groundbreaking field work, Hurston also channeled a great deal of her anthropological studies into her art. Their Eyes Were Watching God was revelatory in so many ways, including her phonetic use of the colloquial language of former slave communities in the American South.

Baby Dolls, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, 2016. By Wendel A. White.

Thinking about Zora Neale Hurston is a great entry for looking at the new work by photographer and academic Wendel A. White, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies. Like Hurston, Wendel developed his work with both the discipline and insight of an academic anthropologist and the skill and wisdom of an artist (some histories are better told in metaphors). Manifest, both an exhibition at the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and a new publication with Radius Books, is a collection of photographs made in the archives of institutions found in the original 13 American colonies — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The photographs document the histories of slavery and racism as represented in collections and vaults across these states (plus Washington D.C.), and include early photographs of African Americans, slave collars and shackles, Civil Rights era paraphernalia, locks of hair, books, slave ledgers, combs, and simple tools. The pictures are composed with a rigid formalism, using some of the most basic elements of photography to create rich visual expressions and metaphors. The result is an incredible ethnology, full of clear descriptions of unique and telling objects, and created with a profound love of photography.

Tabletop Voting Machine, 1955. Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, DE. By Wendel White

Published by Radius Books, the monograph Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is luscious. The pictures are printed glossy, but on matte black pages. The production shows a great attention to detail, with rich black tones (essential for this book) but without sacrificing luminance. It also includes essays by Ilisa Barbash, a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard; Cheryl Finley, an Art Historian at Cornell; Leigh Raiford, a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; and White himself. Also reproduced are conversations with Deborah Willis, Brenda Dione Tindal, and White. These contributions are essential because they clearly situate White within a pantheon of elite academics and curators, those in positions that define history. They also help to fully articulate the significance of the archives and institutions that helped define race in the United States. The text, all printed on a soft, white paper, breaks the book into clear, digestible sections while also helping to guide our understanding of the pictures.

I do believe it is important to note the academic nature of Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, not as a qualitative assessment, but to better understand the intentions and visual vocabulary found in the photographs. This is also a clear distinction from Hurston, who deliberately developed her work in a more vernacular language. White instead presents his photographs with a rigid approach to studio photography, using basic attributes like light, depth of field, and an ambiguous, empty space to define his pictures.

Ambrotype of Frederick Douglass, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. By Wendel A. White

The cited passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God can offer deeper insights into White’s photographs and the archives where he found them. Hurston describes an incredible phenomenon that anyone working in photography must reconcile at some point (I believe a real study of the photographic history means looking at colonialism and slavery, both issues rooted in the early practice of the medium and too often ignored); photographs don’t show us difference, they create it. White’s voice is much more academic than Hurston’s, but still developed from the same idea. By working so proficiently within the institutional paradigm, he is able to document and undermine it, utilizing a new authority to tell stories and histories about the institutions that propagated and archived slavery, racism, and hegemony.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review Some Lights Are From Fires Photographs by Barbara Bosworth Reviewed by George Slade "Bosworth’s book is simply exquisite. That is, both simple in execution and profoundly emotive. Six bound signatures, fits within the span of my hand. Shades of gray, sprinkled with tests of light from fire, moon light, and stars. Suggested listening: Ry Cooder. .."

Some Lights Are From Fires 

By Barbara Bosworth.

Some Lights Are From Fires
Photographs by Barbara Bosworth
Dust Collective, 2024. 19 images, 6x8½".

Bosworth’s book is simply exquisite. That is, both simple in execution and profoundly emotive. Six bound signatures, fits within the span of my hand. Shades of gray, sprinkled with tests of light from fire, moon light, and stars. Suggested listening: Ry Cooder.

The dedication is spine-tingling. “For Ron, my brother, who lived in the shadows. He taught me to look for the light. 1955-2022.” One sees an angular figure disappearing into the distance, moving in three zoom out steps from a medium shot to an expansive beach scene. Sky, ground, shadow, water, clouds, all merge as the crepuscular context. Two hands insistently point skyward, the barest touches of human presence. We are so small in this space.

Edition of 100. A threnody, moving to tears, that arrives in a modest package. You might expect a volume like this to be mere field notes from a photographer known for large-format captures. Instead, this is a fully articulated, self-contained artists book. The content arrives in waves, swoops, and showers of sparks.

Night vision doesn’t see colors, just forms. And we are graced with form herein.

My words gild this lily.

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George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

Book Review Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía Photographs by Louis Carlos Bernal Reviewed by Blake Andrews “How is it that Louis Carlos Bernal has never had a proper monograph before now? The late master was revered as “the father of Chicano art photography.” But his influence extended beyond his Mexican/American heritage. He was a major figure in the 70s and 80s, first in his native Arizona and then nationally..."

Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía.

Louis Carlos Bernal
Monografía
Aperture, New York, NY, 2024. 232 pp., 166 images, 8½x10½".

How is it that Louis Carlos Bernal has never had a proper monograph before now? The late master was revered as “the father of Chicano art photography.” But his influence extended beyond his Mexican/American heritage. He was a major figure in the 70s and 80s, first in his native Arizona and then nationally. He founded the photography program at Pima Community College in Tucson, where he supervised and taught. Over a career spanning roughly two decades, he received numerous awards, commissions, articles, and collaborations, earning his archive eventual placement at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.

All fine. But for those seeking his work in printed form, the trail is thin. His photos have only appeared to date in scattered publications, tucked away in journals or magazines. For various reasons he did not publish any monographs during his lifetime. And no one has taken up the mantle since his death in 1993.

Better late than never. Aperture’s eponymous tome Louis Carlos Bernal makes up for lost time in one fell swoop. This career survey finally confers full retrospective treatment on Bernal, with hundreds of photographs, multiple essays, press clippings, a biographical timeline, and snapshots from his life. In the spirit of Bernal’s bilingual heritage, the texts are in English and Spanish. The book is published in conjunction with a major retrospective at CCP in Tucson, on display from September 14th, 2024, through January 25th, 2025.

For those who can’t visit CCP in person, Aperture’s book is a fair substitute. After a small flurry of introductory photographs, exhibition curator Elizabeth Ferrer dives in with a lengthy overview of Bernal’s life and work. If you don’t yet know much about Bernal, Ferrer’s essay is a good starting point. She weaves a history from his birth in Douglas, Arizona to his military service, grad school, and early mentorships. From this point his career ascended inexorably, blending teaching, documentary studies, and regular stabs into the insular world of museums, galleries, and recognition.

As with many photographers working in the art trenches, Bernal’s spent much of his career plagued by a sense of under appreciation. He came from a minority culture, documented neglected barrios, and lived far from any major art capitals. If he developed a chip on his shoulder against the gallery set, that was understandable. Bernal’s delicate dance with respect, accomplishment, and financial livelihood is one of the main through lines in Ferrer’s bio. In response to those inquiries, this belated monograph might finally offer a sense of closure.

The other through line is of course Bernal’s photographs. The book plucks representative groupings from various projects, tracing a rough chronology from 1972 to 1989. All are faithfully reprinted, even if they preserve occasional film-era imperfections such as C-print color casts or heavy-handed shadows. They trace a timeline of Bernal’s styles from abstract to conceptual to formal records and street photography, initially in monochrome and later in warm color. The selection spotlights this sequence of interests, making increasingly assured probes into environmental portraiture. It’s here that Bernal’s primary focus would settle for the bulk of his career. As evidenced by the cover photograph — the iconic image Dos Mujeres, Douglas, Arizona, 1978 — he developed into a master of the genre.

Many of Bernal’s in situ portraits were shot close to home in Arizona, in the barrios of Tucson, Douglas, or Phoenix. Speaking fluent Spanish, he made easy connections with potential subjects. He liked to position people in or near their homes, where their gardens, furniture, wall hangings, framed pictures (a particular fascination), TVs, curtains, tools, and Christmas lights could help him tell their backstories. Bernal’s wide-angle lens captured tracts of raw information, weaving tales of memory, salvage, ritual, and routine. In several cases the settings alone sufficed, and he dispatched with humans to shoot empty domestic interiors. In a couple of photographs, a simple collection of mascara on a dresser is enough to describe a person. Regardless of subject, he was a wiz with technique. His photographs apply mixed lighting, color, compositional layering, and framing easily, and in distinctive style.

With over a hundred photographs, Aperture’s tome is a great introduction to Bernal’s oeuvre. This book will be a treat for any fans of portraiture or Southwest photography. But Bernal’s pictures may not even be the main highlight. For me, the photographs of Bernal himself are perhaps even more magnetic. Several old snapshots are reproduced throughout the book. A photo of the Bernal family in 1940s Arizona has a quiet majesty. He is later shown in high school posing with his camera. Another picture shows him mustached by a mural, and there he is with Manual Alvarez Bravo, both being photographed by Graciela Iturbide. Sifting these old prints is a pleasure. It turns out Bernal was photographed plenty by others, and even rubbed shoulders with photo royalty. If he felt under-appreciated, that was never quite true. Louis Carlos Bernal should be the final nail in that misconception.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.