In 2012, Dewi Lewis Publishing issued David Rochkind’s “Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit,” a hardback of 144 pages and 90 colour plates, measuring roughly 31 by 25 centimetres. The book takes as its subject Mexico’s drug war in the years following the 2006 presidential election, when Felipe Calderón escalated military and police operations against the cartels. Rochkind, an American photographer long based in Latin America, works against the body-count shorthand that often stands in for reporting on the conflict. Rather than leading with carnage, he looks at what persists around it: the strain, fear and ambient tension that violence leaves behind in ordinary life.

The photographs survey a conflict that is not confined to a single region or border corridor. The war’s wounds, in the book’s framing, reach into daily existence across the country and shape what Mexico’s future can hold. Rochkind’s stated aim is to make difficult material legible without softening it — images that are at once composed and unsettled. The plate sequence should be read as an argument rather than a survey: it asks the viewer to register accumulation and aftermath, not isolated atrocity.

The book’s scale matters. A large-format hardback with 90 colour plates gives the pictures room to be looked at slowly, and its title — “Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit” — frames state force and its psychic cost as the two poles of the project. For collectors, the interest lies in that conjunction of subject and form: a sustained photographic meditation on the residue of a war, made by a photographer working within the region and published by a house known for serious photographic books. It belongs on a shelf of conflict photography that treats aftermath as its central problem rather than its backdrop.