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Dogbreath by Matthew Genitempo.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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