Peyote, deer and corn are brothers: a triangle that is also a single being, a face, in one account from the Huichol tradition, that only the Huichol can see. Pablo Ortiz Monasterio takes that formulation as his subject in Peyote, his first contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series and his second publication with the press. The plant at the center of the book, a small spineless cactus native to Mexico, has been used for its psychoactive properties by indigenous peoples for more than five thousand years. The photographs look toward its ceremonial life rather than its botany alone, attending to the staffs of power, the ribbons and deer horns carried by the captain of the peyote gatherers, and the gestures of the dance.

Ortiz Monasterio is a Mexican photographer, writer and editor whose work is exhibited and collected internationally. The book draws on that editorial intelligence as much as on his eye: a sequence of twelve four-color plates in a compact hardcover, published as number 29 in the second One Picture Book series. The format asks the pictures to work as an argument rather than a survey. What emerges is a glimpse—the publisher’s word, and an apt one—into a living ritual, one that resists the explanatory habits of documentary photography.

Copies are limited to 500 numbered examples, each accompanied by a 5×7 inch original print signed by the artist. For a collector, the interest is doubled: the book is an object in its own right, and the signed print places a photograph by a significant contemporary Mexican artist directly in the buyer’s hands. The pairing of image and page, print and sequence, is the kind of bookmaking that rewards return visits.

Because the ceremony belongs to communities whose knowledge is not universally shared, the photographs carry an ethical charge as well as an aesthetic one. Peyote is neither travelogue nor ethnography; it is an artist’s approach to a subject that has shaped Mexican cultural life for millennia, made in collaboration with the terms the tradition itself provides. That restraint is the book’s distinction, and the reason it belongs in a serious photography collection.