Luis’ Family

The project is an extended series of portraits, centered around the owner of the brickyard, a middle-aged bachelor by the name of Luis Robles, who lives with a couple by the name of Juana and Alvino, their children Manuel, Sara, Faustino, Danilla, and Velen, and Juana’s father Juan. The project takes shape as a revolving encounter that moves continuously between the family’s and outer worlds, and no attempt to describe as if from an objective distance the routines and patterns of daily living. Salzmann does not adopt the stance of a dispassionate but sympathetic reporter, for example in the mode of Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or of a reporter-manqu in the manner of Evans’s collaborator, James Agee, whose approach Payne’s text vaguely recalls. The photographs jettison nearly all reportorial conceits, and instead function as an analogue of this extended family’s inner and outer realities, which Salzmann positions himself to receive with a distinctly non-conclusive receptivity.