Lines and Lineage (hardcover book)

Available for purchase from Radius Books ↗︎ 

• Hardcover first edition book 

• 25 x 30 cm (10 x 12 inch) 

• 80 images / 160 pages 

• All text in Spanish and English 

Summary: 

With Lines and Lineage, Tomas van Houtryve 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, van Houtryve chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. His 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. 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.

”With his pictures, he homes in on the historical amnesia that envelops not just the Mexican-American War but so much else of America’s past, effectively enabling our new era of intolerance.”

- Simon Romero, New York Times

"Lines and Lineage is a remarkable book for many reasons... What is impressive is the vigor and kindness, the cohesiveness, of van Houtryve’s pursuit. And while nothing can replace an archive that was lost or never made, Lines and Lineage opens a space, similar to what John Berger once described as “the field of memory”. A place, in which different narratives co-exist – moments of revelation that withstand the flow of time."

- Sabrina Mandanic, Collector Daily

Available for purchase from Radius Books ↗︎

More info. 

ISBN: 978-1942185628