For his first book, the US-Dominican artist Luis Alberto Rodriguez turned to County Wexford, on Ireland’s southeast coast, where farming, sport and dance keep older rhythms running beneath contemporary life. Trained as a dancer before he took up photography, Rodriguez reads bodies the way other photographers read faces. He photographs weathered hands, scarred limbs and faces marked by weather and work, and he choreographs the people he meets into group tableaux that treat physical labour as something handed down through generations rather than merely performed.
The book’s longest strand grew out of hurling, which Rodriguez encountered locally as an almost violent form of intimacy: within seconds, players push, grab, wrestle one another down and then pull each other back up. Working with them, he restaged those gestures as sculptural arrangements of layered bodies. Elsewhere, young female Irish dancers appear in fields still wearing the exaggerated glamour of competition dress, a deliberate dislocation that asks what happens when inherited traditions are carried into the open landscape that produced them. Throughout, Rodriguez treats the picture as a gathering rather than a portrait, closer in spirit to a large, unruly family photograph than to reportage.
Loose Joints published the book in March 2020, in a section-sewn, embossed hardcover held in a handmade slipcase, at 230 × 275 mm and 114 pages. Sixty-three tritone plates give the images their softened, earth-toned register, a printing choice well matched to the subject. Tim Walker and Orla Fitzpatrick contribute texts and Sarah Chaplin Espenon served as editor, but the photographs are Rodriguez’s alone; the volume is best understood as a single sustained authorial project built with and among a community.
For a collection centered on contemporary documentary and on photography’s engagement with dance, labour and craft, this is a considered acquisition. It documents a specific place without converting its people into symbols, and it shows a photographer working from embodied knowledge rather than observation from a distance.
