The title means “in view,” and the book holds to that phrase. In the rural cemeteries of Yucatán, Mexico, the dead are generally not embalmed before burial; after three years in the ground, remains are exhumed and moved to ossuaries or makeshift containers, where they remain in the open. Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez, who made this book as the fifty-seventh title in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, photograph what that practice makes visible. Bones, skulls, and containers are recorded without melodrama; the camera stays close enough to register texture and distant enough to keep the scene from becoming spectacle. The result is a direct encounter with a funerary custom many readers know only by report.
This is the sixth Nazraeli title by del Valle and Gómez, and the collaboration shapes the book. The subject could easily be reduced to a single shocking image, yet the sequence of color plates carries the weight, compelling attention across the page rather than toward a sensational detail. An excerpt from Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude opens the volume, placing the photographs in a literary reflection on Mexican identity and death rather than presenting them as raw documentation alone.
Physically, En Vista belongs to a series built around compression: hardcover, five and a half by seven and a quarter inches, sixteen pages. The small scale keeps viewing intimate, and the inclusion of an original print made from an original negative gives the object a material dimension a standard photobook lacks. The series format is not incidental to the meaning; it forces the photographs into close quarters and asks the reader to look slowly.
Collectors of Latin American photography, of del Valle and Gómez’s long partnership, or of the One Picture Book series will find the book at a point where subject, format, and literary framing meet. It is not a survey or a monument. It is a short, tightly edited volume about what a community chooses to keep in view, and it rewards the kind of attention its size demands.
