Michael Lundgren made the photographs in Transfigurations in the Sonoran desert beginning in 2003, and the book gathers that work into a single sustained argument about what landscape photography can still do. The terrain he describes is not scenery. It is ground in constant change, where light and atmosphere alter what the camera can hold, and where, as the publisher puts it, even the rocks move. Working in black and white, Lundgren treats the desert as a place where beauty and terror are inseparable, and where myth and metaphor stay unfixed. The result is a body of work that reaches past documentation and idealization toward something closer to an ecstatic or atavistic experience of land.
That ambition places the book in deliberate relation to a history it also resists. Landscape photography began as a tool for geographic and scientific survey, then became a way of picturing nature and the spectacle of human progress. Transfigurations asks what was lost in that transition: the possibility that photographs of the land might speak to states of mind, to the primitive and the sublime. Lundgren’s desert is legible partly through absence, through what cannot be seen or held. The photographs do not resolve that tension so much as keep it open.
Radius Books issued the volume in hardcover at 14 by 11 inches, with 40 images across 64 pages. The scale matters. It gives the black-and-white tonal shifts room to accumulate, so that the sequence reads as a single meditation rather than a survey of sites. Rebecca Solnit contributes an essay and William Jenkins an afterword, placing the pictures in conversation with writing that shares their speculative reach. Photographer, essayist, and afterword are distinct roles here, and the book is shaped by all three.
For a collector, the interest lies in that combination: a photographer working at the edge of an established genre, a publisher known for serious attention to the photobook as an object, and two writers whose participation extends the argument beyond the images. Transfigurations is a compact, considered book about perception under conditions that refuse to stand still, and it repays the kind of looking that its subject demands.
