Kristine Potter made the photographs in Manifest between 2012 and 2015, working in remote stretches along the western slope of Colorado. The book’s subject is the American cowboy, an archetype she approaches with the same scrutiny she brought to the American soldier in earlier work. What she finds is not the settled iconography of the western landscape tradition but a harder and more disorienting terrain, occupied by men who appear only sparingly across it, bound to a myth that also sets them apart from it.

Manifest is not documentary in method. It works instead as a re-coding of the western myth, holding fantasy and reality in the same frame. Body and landscape are woven together; the book registers the seduction of the West and the opportunities it seems to promise, alongside the disorientation of altitude and the presence of persistent danger. Forty-eight duotone plates carry that argument across ninety-two pages, in a sequence that lets figure and ground press against one another rather than settling into illustration.

The physical book is modest in scale but deliberate in construction: an embossed paperbound hardcover with tip-ons, measuring 24.1 by 28.6 centimeters. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa contributes an afterword, giving the pictures a second voice and a critical frame. Published by TBW Books in 2018, the volume is Potter’s debut monograph, which makes its composure and its refusal of easy nostalgia all the more notable.

For a collector, Manifest matters less as a document of Colorado than as a sustained reconsideration of a loaded American subject by a photographer willing to complicate it. In 2018 Potter was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and the book stands as an early, fully formed statement of the concerns she has continued to pursue.