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Loneliness is as present as faith throughout the book. The loneliness of travel is endemic in photography’s history for those who leave the studio and travel in search of their subjects. Soth experienced it and recognized it in others. Rather than reject or ignore it, he sought it out, transforming it to empathy. It is all too easy to aim a camera, which can be harsh and unforgiving.
These photographs, now four decades old, seem clearly stained with a sentiment for the country, or at least the country-of-my-mind. Then again, aren’t they all countries of our minds? Isn’t that the issue here? The lands we ‘live in’, their meaning and narratives are mostly a web we spin, stories we tell ourselves of history, identity, heritage, ‘character’ — these are the cloth in which we wrap ourselves, to explain or justify entrenched attitudes and political viewpoints.
In late 1972, shortly after his twenty-seventh birthday, Lewis Baltz conducted an interview . . . with himself. The immediate spur for this unwonted act of self-inquiry is unclear, although it came at a moment when the artist was beginning to receive national attention for his photography. A typed transcript of the interview, which was never published, has recently surfaced, having been handed on at the time by Baltz to one of his students, Laurie Brown.
I started taking pictures with Guillermina and Belinda back in 1999 when they were nine years old. We would pretend we were on a TV show and I would film them while they interviewed each other. They’d dance and sing and ask each other about their favorite fruit or animal or singer. I’d often whisper to them my own questions.
Mrs. Cameron has carried the art of photography to a more poetic degree of perfection than any other photographer whose works have come under our notice. No other artist with whom we are acquainted has combined with such absolute mastery over the technic resources of the art so refined a taste and so large an amount of genuine artistic feeling.
Like any artists, they were inspired sometimes more than others. They needed to have their cameras with them always and plenty of film, so that when they wanted to photograph something—a hog killing, a colt being born, a birthday party—they could. Picture taking became simply part of their lives, and especially of their play.