Lines and Lineage selected as finalist for the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award
My Lines and Lineage series of photos about the missing photographic history of the American West was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
About the Award
The Leica Oskar Barnack Award honors “professional photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form.” It is named after Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the Leica camera, and it has been awarded since 1979. Previous winners include Martin Kollar, Guy Tillim, Andrea Hoyer, Luc Delahaye, Claudine Doury, Larry Towell, Eugene Richards and Sebastiao Salgado. My series, Behind the Curtains, was also chosen as LOBA finalist in 2011. For the 2019 award, the members of the jury were Karin Rehn-Kaufmann, Max Pinckers, Milena Carstens, Enrico Stefanelli and Steve McCurry.
About the work
Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.
Where to view the work
• Solo exhibition in Paris through 29 June, 2019 at the baudoin lebon gallery
• Group exhibition in New York City through 30 June, 2019 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
• Roger Pic Award winners exhibition in Paris through 25 Oct. 2019 at LaSCAM
• Forthcoming in September, 2019, monograph published by Radius Books
Artist interview video