Tlaxcalan Sketches: Santa Isabel Xiloxoxtla

In the summer of 1969, braided between his work in New York City and Philadelphia, and as a follow-on to his project in Ciudad Juárez, Salzmann spent six weeks in the village of Santa Isabel Xiloxoxtla, near the city of Tlaxcala in southeastern Mexico. Two years later, he returned for another month. These visits resulted in one of Salzmann’s most plaintive documentary works, Tlaxcalan Sketches. With this work, Salzmann rounds out what I would call four primary modalities in which he approaches the problem of giving-image to historical consciousness.

Tlaxcalan Sketches proceeds altogether without narrative architecture. It unfolds a series of impressions of village life to be seen in no particular order, according to no discernible plot, without confessing any names or relationships, recognizing no hierarchy of major and minor disclosures. In the world it describes, there are few events, tasks, and rituals. And yet, Santa Isabel is not ethereal. It is a place of mudbrick walls and gardens, dirt tracks and bare electric lights, erosion and big agaves, crisp light and brass bands. It is a world of utopic overtones, not defined primarily by suffering or by desire, and so not a world of struggle, conflict, virtue and change. It is not a fundamentally damaged world and also not a deathless one (we do witness a burial), but it is a world at peace, seemingly made of peace—where dreams approach but not because they are required to live with decency. Or to put it differently, Salzmann’s Tlaxcalan photographs poignantly describe a world without historical poignancy, inasmuch as such poignancy appears against a void, a backstory of loss.43 Salzmann’s Santa Isabel has no such backstory.

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