Blog

Talk

VII Interactive Book Club: “Lines and Lineage” on May 3rd, 2020 at 18:00 CET / 12:00 noon EDT / 9:00am PDT

I’ll be speaking about my latest book, Lines and Lineage, as part of the weekly VII Interactive Book Club. To access this free live event, you can visit the VII Facebook video stream page on May 3rd, 2020 at 18:00 CET / 12:00noon EDT or you can subscribe to the VII mailing list to receive an invitation to the Zoom call.

The book 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 in diptychs with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage also includes historic maps and essays.

This book 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. Lines and Lineage was awarded France’s prestigious Roger Pic Prize and was selected as a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. The work was profiled by The New York Times, in Photograph Magazine, and in HyperAllergic. It was published as a monograph by Radius Books in autumn 2019.

Register for the Talk »

April 25, 2020

Book Signing

Lines and Lineage book signing at Paris Photo on Saturday, 9 November

My Lines and Lineage book will be publicly released on Saturday, 9 November, 2019 at the Paris Photo fair. Starting at 2:00 pm, I will be signing books alongside historian Carrie Gibson, who contributed an essay to the book.

Booth SE-02, Radius Books
Paris Photo
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
France

The book 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 in diptychs with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. The book also includes historic maps and essays.

You can read the following text excerpts from the book:

• excerpt #1, the Steinbeck epigraph
• excerpt #2, the dark history of California’s Bear Flag
• excerpt #3, Liz Wallace tells of bounties put on the heads of natives

The work was profiled by The New York Times, in Photograph Magazine, and in HyperAllergic.

Published by Radius Books in 2019. 136 pages with duotone photos. All text in Spanish and English. Four covers available. ISBN: 9781942185628

If you are unable to attend the book signing, some signed copies are available for order directly from Radius Books.

November 7, 2019

Group Exhibition

Lines and Lineage exhibition at the Photolux Festival in Lucca, Italy

Seventeen prints of Lines and Lineage is on exhibition at the PHOTOLUX FESTIVAL in Lucca, Tuscany from 16 November to 8 December 2019 along with the other finalists of the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

Chiesa di Santa Maria Annunziata dei Servi
Piazza dei Servi
Lucca, Tuscany
Italy

Hours: Monday – Friday 15:00 – 19:30 / Saturday and Sunday 10:00 – 19 :30

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. The work will be published as a monograph by Radius Books in Autumn 2019.

Reviews and praise for Lines and Lineage

“…Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His equipment in the Instagram age? A 19th-century camera he found in a Paris antique shop. He stocked up on the glass plates and pungent potions needed for the wet-collodion process, a technique invented in 1851. Doing so, Mr. van Houtryve conjures what the West may have looked like in the Mexican era…”

— Simon Romero in The New York Times

“His portraits are carefully researched and historically relevant – all of his subjects are descendants of the area’s original Mexican inhabitants. Quiet and dignified, the images pay tribute to Nadar, whose powerful portraits Van Houtryve admires. He focuses on his subjects’ eyes, conveying a sense of their interior life. He presents the work in diptychs that juxtapose portraits with romantic landscapes, reflecting an intimate connection between humans and nature…”

— Elisabeth Biondi in Photograph Magazine

“…Photographing the descendants of families who live on the once-Mexican territory, Van Houtryve proves their existence within a dominant narrative that often ignores them. Using traditional nineteenth century photographic techniques, like wet plate glass negatives, the artist taps into the aesthetic of the 1800s…”

— Zachary Small in Hyperallergic

Artist interview video

October 23, 2019