Tomas van Houtryve’s Lines and Lineage starts from a gap in the record. Mexico ruled what is now the American West before the region was absorbed by the United States, and photographs from that period are essentially absent. The Belgian American photographer, born in 1975, responded not by illustrating the missing years but by reconstructing their conditions: he worked with glass plates and a nineteenth-century wooden camera, letting an obsolete process shape what could be seen.

The book’s central structure is the diptych. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West, among them mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous and Crypto-Jewish sitters, face photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Historic maps and essays are woven into the sequence. The pairings ask the reader to hold lineage and territory together, with the absent nineteenth-century photograph occupying the space between them.

Radius Books issued the volume in hardcover at 160 pages, with text by Carrie Gibson and some eighty images. It appeared with four covers, each joining a different portrait to a landscape; trade copies were distributed without a fixed front. That decision keeps any single image from becoming the book’s definitive face and makes the physical object part of the argument about which pictures survive and which do not. Simon Romero, writing in The New York Times, described van Houtryve’s pictures as homing in on the historical amnesia surrounding the Mexican-American War and much else in America’s past.

The book treats photography as a participant in that amnesia rather than a neutral record of it. For collectors interested in photobooks that interrogate the medium’s authority, and in work that sits at the meeting point of history, landscape and portraiture, Lines and Lineage is a considered and substantial example.