At the center of Mikel Bastida’s Anarene is a ghost town in Archer County, Texas, as portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. The site is more than a cinematic reference: it establishes the book’s central question of how fiction changes the way a physical place is seen, remembered, and assigned meaning.

The photographs emerged from an eight-year project made across the United States. Working from a practice informed by staged photography, cinema, and history, Bastida sought images and stories that film culture had deposited in the American landscape. His subject is therefore not simply the country itself, nor a catalogue of recognizable locations, but an America encountered through prior representations—places whose identities have been shaped by narratives already attached to them.

Landscapes, people, and overlooked or abandoned objects occupy this unstable ground between lived reality and cultural memory. Bastida attends to fragments that remain after the fiction has moved on, including subjects pushed to the margins or seemingly suspended outside ordinary time. The resulting view of the United States is neither celebratory nor conventionally documentary. It examines how cinema can enlarge a place into myth while obscuring the particular lives and material circumstances found there.

Published by RM Verlag in 2023, Anarene is an English-language hardcover of 116 pages. Its interest for a serious photobook collection lies in the sustained duration of the project and in its precise conjunction of photography, film history, and the mythology of place. Rather than borrowing cinematic atmosphere as style alone, Bastida treats cinema as an active force in the production of landscape and memory, giving the monograph a focused conceptual position within contemporary photographic work on the United States.