Tomas van Houtryve: Lines and Lineage

There is no photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what is now the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, photographer TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE photographed the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Van Houtryve pairs portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book challenges dominant Western mythologies and questions the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

This book has four covers, each featuring a different portrait on the front and a landscape on the back. Please choose either Bernadette, Dorothy, Gomeo, or Nathan at check-out.