Matthew Genitempo is producing serious photobooks. Of the three books that I am fortunate to have on my shelves, his latest Dogbreath is one of his finest, but it is hard to create a hierarchy between it, Mother of Dogs, and Jasper. All three titles are excellent offerings, and it would benefit photobook makers to take note of how Matthew releases his books. He is less concerned with volume than he is with nailing the production of his books and working hard to ensure their legibility through thoughtful sequencing and refined design to get the images across. Cody Haltom has done an excellent job designing the book with Matthew.
Matthew’s first book Jasper was a considerable success, published by Twin Palms in 2018, and Matthew released and quickly sold out his second title Mother of Dogs in 2023. This book differed from Jasper which shared a kinship to publishing house label mate Bryan Schutmaat’s work. Though the two have always produced independent visions, there was something in Jasper and Bryan’s Good God Damn that shared some sympathy. Perhaps it was the subject matter- the flannel, the gun, and the pick-up brigade, but that was as close as they would get in terms of aesthetics again. Bryan has been busy with the great wide of Texas, whereas Matthew is narrowing in on geography. Both are equal value, but there is less and less crossover between their work. However, the resonant monochrome images of both artists still link and carry through an aesthetic that fits well with the other artists on the Trespasser roster.
The shift from Jasper to Mother of Dogs felt quite significant. A few years passed, the Covid-19 moment passed, and there felt like a shift in Matthew’s work built on a slower series of observations. There was less of an implied narrative, and the pictures began to take up more of the book’s weight than any proposed narrative’s structure. Jasper felt like it might have been a film set in some ways, whereas Mother of Dogs began the legwork of zeroing in on Matthew and his photographs, which began to offer more clarity of vision. There was a significant shift toward photographs for photography’s sake in the work. I was reminded of both Raymond Meeks and John Gossage for how Matthew began composing his images, often with a depth of field being toyed with to express a form of picture-making where objects close to the lens are distorted, fuzzy, and dislocated. In contrast, images in the back remain clear.
It is a method of picture-making that few artists play with, as it takes some time to work out the math on obfuscated, composed, and genuinely photographic images. We spend a lot of time discussing what photography can do to relate the world to us, but we spend much less time talking about what photography is and can do for itself. Combining the technical effrontery that photography offers asks the viewer to do some work to understand the medium and its range of possibilities. Matthew, John, and Raymond have made significant efforts to realize the camera’s potential and have harnessed it to promote the growth of vision through a conversely difficult way of reading images. This is progressive.
Of the three books Matthew has produced, a shared vibrancy operates between all of the volumes. Whereas I felt the most significant leap or change of the iterations of Matthew’s vision might have been between Jasper and Mother of Dogs, I find that Dogbreath might share equal amounts of commonality between both of the preceding titles. The outward idea of a story regarding a community of punk rock kids in Tuscon, Arizona, is similar to the observed life of people living in the Ozarks. Still, the stylistic inferences remind me much more of Mother of Dogs in Dogbreath with the aforementioned optical effrontery and a further shared insistence on backyard fence gazing that is found in MoD. Perhaps the titles are significant in lacing them together. Mother of Dogbreath as it were.
Where Dogbreath deviates in its entirety (minus a TV and some VHS tapes in Jasper) from either of the two previous works is the use of screen imagery, which you encounter immediately on the cover. The VCR or HI8 tape images are where most of the punk rock part of the story seems to take place outside of the photographs Matthew shoots, which feel less indebted to a punk rock community than a general community of young skater kids and so on. Those communities are often interlinked, but the direct relationship to the music takes place in the video.
This is a direct reference to Larry Clark’s The Perfect Childhood, where Clark photographed his television set to spectacular levels, making a book full of those images and his collages to significant effect. More recently, and doubtful, Matthew has seen some of these titles, Gui Marcondes I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me, Erik Gustafsson’s This is Farewell, and forthcoming dropping at the same time, Jason Hendardy’s This is Not a Test all share similar attitudes toward screen imagery. Screens are not new to photography.
One can evoke the spirit of Lee Friedlander and Clark, amongst others, but what is interesting is that there is an implied generational statement associated with the analog or quasi-analog uses of screen imagery found in this generation of millennials that make the work fascinating regarding their relationship to screens and how that changed during their youth. In some ways, it is an indirect communique from the last generation to remember life before the complete stranglehold of digital technology. Something analogous to skate culture, punk rock, DIY, and the early pioneering days of home recording makes this gesture authentic, and authenticity is an essential question for many of us as we slide into the wasteland of distrust and digital duplicity.
In other associations, I could not help but feel a kinship in the portraiture to Mark Steinmetz and Jim Goldberg, mainly Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves and Steinmetz’s Past K-Ville. In Steinmetz’s case, simple, beautiful monochrome portraits give off a peculiar intensity in their indirect behavior. Parking lot and gas station children illuminated by the sun creeping around the corner, that kind of thing. In this sense, it reminds me less of the wayfaring punks of Goldberg’s book but more as if Kevin Smith had found a 6×7, teamed uo with Harmony Korine and had been zapped from Clerks and Gummo to the present to catch a photographic still or two.
In the case of referencing Goldberg, it comes down to the text, which in Dogbreath is slightly less intense than in Raised by Wolves but Matthew still captures a listlessness found in the often-overlooked, in the voice of Dove. Whereas as Goldberg’s celebrated book screams from the back of the throat, the text about Dove in Matthew’s book connects the unassuming inability to fit in, built from musings about radio scrapping and what seems like an exit plan potentially involving time travel or teleportation away from the back alleys of Tucson. It doesn’t scream, but it still kicks.
Throughout Dogbreath, I am taken more with the pictures than I am with any idea of a story though I can undoubtedly craft one from the images within the book. It feels intrepid, like a stroll through the alleys of Tucson, as mentioned above. There is a rhythm in the work that feels mobile. MoD also featured this element, which felt more like a stroll. Walking is an element in photography that is often seen but needs to be discussed. Gary Green’s The River is Moving might be a good example of a book where you can feel the continuous walking motion. I would suggest Matthew’s walking falls in line closer to Gossage and Meeks, where walking and adventure are essential. Still, it is not necessarily continuous like Green’s or perhaps Guido Guidi’s; the latter’s movement is probably not as much a product of walking as they are of familiarity with a tiny area. Still, repetition often makes the work continuous despite the large camera.
Further worth noting is that there is an album. by Michael A.Muller that accompanies the book, which I have yet to listen to. Thankfully, artists have explored this territory more over the past few years. Mikael Siirilä’s Here, in Absence, also from this year, has an album with it. I released Mondo Decay with a soundtrack in 2022, and other artists are also exploring how sound can activate the experience of a photobook. A direct correlation of page-turning to audio fails in many ways, but they can be digested at intervals and different moments. I guess they enable each other through feeling more than pacing, a significant nexus for joining two mediums that nearly become a third medium, similar to, but not precisely like, cinema.
In summary, this is a fine photobook, and whereas I have already claimed to have seen some of the best books produced this year, this is undoubtedly at the top of my list. Genitempo continues to evolve, and with the backing team at Trespasser between Bryan and Cody, there seems to be a great emphasis on producing significant titles that map the territory of the SW but are not relegated to an audience only understanding it through that particular lens. It considers the home arena, but at its base, it offers much more discussion about our contemporary times. I applaud Matthew for stepping out further with the screen material and the album. Whereas his eye for shooting is already well-developed, and he could simply ride out a great book with great portraits and obscure shots, he has pushed the envelope a bit more and will reap the rewards for doing so.
I would also commend his sticking to the format of larger books and using horizontal framing in a vertical format, which is a challenging trick to pull off. The size of the book allows that to happen and leverages the images that might otherwise be lost in a smaller size to float to the surface. I am thinking of the backyard gazing images here. With the size, those images are more powerful. Let’s hope book four is as thought through as these first three. Though I do not personally subscribe to this sentiment for my work, artists can take note of Matthew’s offerings, where less is truly more. He is producing substantive books; time will reflect this while the present still salutes his motivations. Dogbreath has my highest recommendation.