Book Review Sons of the Living Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Reviewed by Brian Arnold "There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows..."

Sons of the Living by Bryan Schutmaat.

Sons of the Living
Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 188 pp., 90 tritone plates on uncoated paper, 11¾x14¾".

        But when I pass through the pearly gate
        Will my gown be gold instead?
        Or just a red clay robe with red clay wings
        And a red clay halo for my head?

                                                    — Gillian Welch

There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows. His body sits effortlessly, looking both powerful and relaxed. He’s a hardworking man with rich golden skin, and it feels clear he’s earned his living in the desert landscape of the American Southwest — a deep, dark complexion cultivated under a relentless sun and layers of red sand. Despite his obvious strength, he also looks very awkward. His crown is a pale, Aryan complexion, kept white and clean by the Stetson he wore out in the field. He reminds me of John Grady Cole, the protagonist in the brilliant Cormac McCarthy novel All the Pretty Horses. To be clear, I remember American landscape painter Richard Thompson once telling me what the film adaptation got wrong; Richard was convinced that John Grady Cole, the handsome and romantic hero, would have a tan line from his hat around the circumference of his head on account of him riding the southwest deserts for weeks, always wearing his dirty and sweat-stained hat. It’s a little less picturesque than Matt Damon’s portrayal of the character, but it might also provide an important metaphor for understanding John Grady, crowned with a halo made from the unforgiving desert sands.

I found this photograph in Sons of the Living, the new, much adored book from Bryan Schutmaat and Trespasser Books. Sons of the Living is a richly visualized, harsh and romantic story about the people and landscapes found in the deserts of the American West. I’ve never really been to Texas — Schutmaat’s homeland and muse — but I have spent a lot of time in the backcountry of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, so think I have good feel for the people and places he photographed. The deserts of the American Southwest are as gorgeous as they are brutal, full of red hills, sage brush, ancient canyons, powerful oil and mineral industries, and an unlikely assortment of outsiders lost along its highways. Schutmaat continues to work in black-and-white, view camera photography, and does not shy away from portraying his deep love for traditional depictions of the region. Indeed, many of his photographs feel like deliberate references to masterpieces by Timothy O’Sullivan, Laura Gilpin, Georgia O’Keefe, and Robert Adams. I would describe Sons of the Living as a loving, tragic, and poetic rendition of the last American frontier, a harsh and broken landscape full gorgeous views and broken dreams.

Schutmaat builds his narrative by mixing photographs of desert vistas (many focusing on highways and trains — both essential for understanding westward expansion) with portraits of people he met during his travels. The landscape photographs are very classical — a train trestle spanning a river gap, the elegant curve of a highway traversing the rolling hills, and storms brewing along a distant horizon (beautifully reminiscent of some platinum pictures by Laura Gilpin) — and clearly articulate the place. The portraits offer an interesting cross-section of characters — workers, drifters, outlaws, and mystics — all revealed as desperate seekers on a lost highway, depicted with remarkable clarity and empathy. Together these pictures present a haunting perspective on the American frontier in the 21st century, Manifest Destiny when the oil wells are dying and the mines abandoned.

To better understand Schutmaat’s photos, I again want to circle back to Cormac McCarthy. I know it’s bad timing to evoke McCarthy, after the recent articles in Vanity Fair and the New York Times, but like Willa Cather and Robert Adams, I think of him as one of the great artists of the American West. This time I want to reference his character Billy Purnam, the protagonist of The Crossing, the brilliant sequel to All the Pretty Horses. The Crossing is ultimately a novel about living with trauma. Early in the story, Billy befriends a wild wolf by nursing her back to health. McCarthy creates the feeling that this is the most nurturing and loving relationship Billy has known, making it so incredibly devastating when he kills her himself, shooting her in the head after she loses a brutal dog fight. Soul beaten, Billy spends the rest of the novel riding horseback along the Texas-Mexico border, following a string of chance encounters with mystics and drifters who teach the wounded man how to live with trauma. When I page through the pictures in Sons of the Living, I feel a similar narrative to those found in McCarthy’s novels — a story about a poet, loner, and outlaw at home among the wanderers of the desert Southwest.

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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 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 För Photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska Reviewed by Brian Arnold "One of my favorites in Robert Adams’s first book of essays, Beauty in Photography, is a piece called “Making Art New.” It’s a funny and playful essay written after paging through the latest copy of Artforum delivered to his front door in rural Colorado..."

För. By Agnieszka Sosnowska.

För
Photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 88 pp., 47 tritone plates, 11x13½".

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is in making love.”

— Man Ray

One of my favorites in Robert Adams’s first book of essays, Beauty in Photography, is a piece called “Making Art New.” It’s a funny and playful essay written after paging through the latest copy of Artforum delivered to his front door in rural Colorado. Adams ultimately feels that what defines new, at least by the magazine’s standards, feels a bit like a Sears Roebuck catalog selling the latest washer and dryer set. Contemporary art, Artforum tries to persuade him, is just like the newest mechanical technologies offering experience and luxury unlike anything before it; the latest trends in post-performancism are no different than the magic of this year’s wrinkle guard¹. This way of thinking leads Adams to some important questions. What does new mean in art? What is the distinction between new and novel? Shouldn’t art aspire to a truth greater than novelty? Answering these questions, he concludes something different, and that the only “contemporary” that matters in art is whether it speaks to the current situation. Would anybody question that Shakespeare’s insights don’t still reflect on our societies and behaviors today? I do fundamentally agree with Adams; quality in art is not a metric based on technology or appearances but is really about the creator’s ability to reflect on the essential joys and struggles of life, to render truths that seem essential to our being and in a way that evokes empathy from its audience. Perhaps it is easiest to think of it this way: anyone falling in love for the first time is experiencing love as if it has never been experienced before, and thus it is a tale that never grows old.

When I spend time with För, the lovely new publication of photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska published by Trespasser Books, it is easy for me to imagine the photographer taking similar inspiration from Adams’s essay. För is a laconic book, mostly pictures with very minimal text and presented in a clear and concise manner. The photographs are made with Graflex 4x5 (there are a couple of exceptions), and all in a classical, documentary style. The pictures in För, however, tell a rich story about love and pain, joy and loss, and are executed with emotional clarity and technical precision, rooted in a deeply personal connection to photography. Simply designed photographs made with traditional black-and-white values, Sosnowska demonstrates, can still convey the most essential attributes of being human today, which is ultimately what led me back to Adams. Her approach couldn’t be simpler — photograph the people and places she calls home with an equal affection for her subjects as she has for making photographs. Through the course of För, we see a small selection of people (presumedly family) leading a humble, pastoral life in the stark, harsh tundra of East Iceland. The pictures are simply developed but rigorously seen, and presented with a rich, open, and inviting black-and-white palette. The place she describes is harsh — I can almost feel the biting winds — but also full of warmth and love, days occupied by the beauty of vast landscapes, horses, imaginative children, and warm baths.

Given the minimal information offered in För, I did some inquiry into Sosnowska and learned she was born in Poland and lived most of her early life in Boston before settling in Iceland. The pictures in För are from her current home, or at least as what I understand as such, an unnamed place in East Iceland photographed between 2001-2021. I find this significant because when I look at Sosnowska’s photographs, it’s not only easy for me to see her tattered and highlighted copy of Beauty in Photography somewhere close by, but I can also imagine her as something of an exile, a stranger in a strange land where no place feels totally like home. Herein, I think, is the real impact of Sosnowska’s pictures — clear, affectionate photographs driven by a profound personal emptiness. Throughout För, there is an incredible tension between connection and isolation, a balancing act between loneliness and love.

Implied, I think, in Adams’s conclusions in “Making Art New” is patience. Anybody reading Shakespeare for the first time knows it’s not easy, and you must take the time to really understand his complex understanding of language and storytelling. Thinking of this photographically, I remember Frank Gohlke once telling me that if you make 7 good pictures in a year you should consider it a success. In the age of social media, we’ve totally lost sight of this, but composed over 20-years, För is a brilliant example of what can happen when you think of photographs this meticulously. Towards the end of “Making Art New,” Adams quotes both Man Ray — that idea that making love can only evolve so much — but also shares a lovely idea from American poet Robert Frost: “Poetry is like love. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Any lasting love requires rigor and patience, and in my mind these ideas lead quickly to wisdom and empathy.

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1. Beauty in Photography was first published in 1981; the cover story in Artforum in October 1981 was “Post-Performancism” by Douglas Davis.

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.