Jim Mangan, The Crick, Twin Palms Publishers, 2023. The book opens with an architectural pretext. Mangan set out to photograph the houses of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Short Creek, the community astride the Utah–Arizona line. The buildings held a subject, but not the subject. What held him were the teenage boys who stayed.

Many of those boys were children when the community came apart after the imprisonment of its leader, Warren Jeffs, in 2011. Families divided: some left Short Creek, others remained. The Crick attends to the ones who remained, and to the world they have made on the ground left to them — riding horseback across southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada, rehearsing the gestures of frontier explorers, half in a game and half in earnest.

Mangan worked on the series for five years, an approach the publisher calls ecological and sociological. The pictures move between the boys and the terrain, and between their actual circumstances and an invented one. Lightning-struck pines, cut stumps, reddened rivers, rock and stone: Judith Freeman, who contributes text to the volume, describes the land’s beauty as furious and surging. Mangan’s subject is not only landscape, but succession — what is handed down, what is refused, and what a group of young men build in the meantime. Prose by Roman Bateman accompanies the photographs.

The book is a substantial object: hardcover, 124 pages, roughly 25 by 33 centimeters, with 55 tri-tone and 13 four-color plates on uncoated paper. For a collector, the interest lies in that combination of scale, sequencing and subject — a body of work about a specific American community that refuses the documentary shortcut of explanation, and instead lets the boys and the country they ride through carry the meaning.