Norman Mauskopf’s Descendants is a photographic study of the Hispanic people of northern New Mexico, a region the publisher describes as a complex weave of pride and history. In this area of ancient traditions and striking environmental and ethnic diversity, Mauskopf spent roughly a decade photographing a culture and its everyday life. The resulting photographs, the publisher states, depict the intersection of religion, injustice, community, and transcendence.

Mauskopf works in black and white, and the book gathers fifty duotone plates. The sustained timeframe is central to the project: rather than a passing survey, the pictures accumulate as a long-term documentary record of one place and its people. The title itself suggests inheritance — the passing down of faith, custom and family across generations.

The book was published by Twin Palms Publishers in 2011 as a 96-page hardcover in landscape, or oblong, format of approximately 12 by 9 inches. It also includes a poem commissioned for the volume by the New Mexican poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. The poem brings a written voice to a project grounded in sustained visual attention.

The images and poem offer different ways of approaching the region. The photographs make people and places visible, while the written contribution adds another form of attention. The meeting of Mauskopf’s photography and Baca’s commissioned poem gives the book more than one voice and keeps attention fixed on a single, specific corner of the American Southwest.