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By Carolyn Drake & Andres Gonzalez.
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Photographs by Carolyn Drake & Andres Gonzalez
MACK, London, 2024. 144 pp., 9x11½".
[Spoiler alert: This review makes the claim that this is a fun book.]
“Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez made photographs side by side along the US-Mexico border between 2018 and 2023.”
Unless you do a little Googling (no fair!) that’s all you get by way of backstory for this book. No captions, no essay, no bios, or curricula vitae. You have the rare opportunity to take a photobook on its merits as a self-contained object.
It’s as though Drake and Gonzalez looked to collaborative books by Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb or Mirta Gomez and Edwardo del Valle. The photographers simultaneously claim and refute authorship, strip it down to its pictorial essence, while leaving a breadcrumb trail of hints that they were in fact working side by side. Shot/reverse shot is so effective that one searches for traces of the other photographer. Two perspectives on the same street corner, the same woman’s hand, or on another’s shoulder. Nearly identical shadows implying no more than a few seconds between exposures. There is no attribution to these photographs, so who took which is a fruitless, probably pointless, game.
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It’s a treat and a trick at once, like a constructed image by a conceptualist like Barbara Probst. Who’s zoomin’ who, Aretha Franklin might ask.
In plain fact, the US Mexico border areas are laden with significance. Befitting Drake’s membership in the collective, a Magnum-esque earnestness is signaled. It’s a serious subject, to be sure. The issue buzzes with concern. Yet this politically dense tidbit is left until the end of the book.
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Well, almost the end. The last page features an image that doubles down on doubling. A twin floral portrait (two flowers side by side) with a multiple exposure feel to it. Almost as though two images were made at the same time then superimposed in post-production. Or that supplemental light was used in concert with or in opposition to natural light. Despite its reveal-all, post-script positioning, it’s a red herring, perhaps the least interesting image in the book. An anticlimax, to be sure.
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One element of the puzzle is tipped off in a lovely, enigmatic image of a black-robed figure standing on an embankment, flanked by glowing studio lights that light up without cords (the miracle of batteries and high luminescence LED lights). Seen at a distance, the figure could be an actor in a Beckett drama, or in a Greek chorus. What we derive from this image is outright evidence that artificial light is employed in the project’s overall strategy, and indeed it — the light, not the lighting devices — appears in image after image, a bit of estrangement, a hint of commercialism, within a generalized context of direct sun and twilight.
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The book/puzzle forces us to take images at face value with the “border” caveat. We also must extend ourselves to regard the people in the photographs at face value. The book doesn’t tell us anything about anyone. For those seeking elucidation turn to this 2020 magazine article, but to look at that feels a little like cheating, like side-stepping the work the photographers are offering us.
Is there something more profound happening here? Need there be? Can't “serious” photographers (Drake and Gonzalez both qualify) have a moment of play? Admittedly, this is sophisticated play. Subtle and subversive. Still, when was the last time you had fun flipping through a photobook?
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Did the lacy white fabric framed and leaning on a chair in a “museum” context lend its pattern to the book’s wraps? Are those two pigeons perched on the blue awning a reference to the photographic duo, or to Drake’s earlier book about birds? Remember, lace is full of air.
The photographers each make cameo appearances in the layouts. But can we assume that the portraits were actually made by the partner, or was each a selfie? Serious fun for certain close viewers. We follow the couple on a meander from here to there — points unspecified. The lingering brilliance of the journey is the trip itself, not the end product.
One must write in elliptical fashion about this work. It is factual and obtuse at once. I’m enjoying the idea of the photographers presenting it to the publisher. It’s about the border! Sort of. Yes. And.
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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