Mark Steinmetz, Rivers & Towns, 2021

The photographs in Rivers & Towns, a new book by mark Steinmetz, were taken between 1982 and 1990 in working-class towns in Connecticut (USA). Steinmetz moves among the factories and mills built along the many rivers that water this southeastern US state, which had already seen their heyday and were experiencing a slow decline. Of that time he says: “I was moved by these places and wanted to describe the bridges, the houses, the roads, and show something of the inner life of the people. At the same time, I was trying to discover myself as a photographer. The 20-year-old Mark Steinmetz of that time was already establishing the themes and methods that would make him the photographer we know today: the moving delicacy of capturing subjects in the landscape they inhabit, the intimate black and white, scenes of children and teenagers in small towns in the American Southeast. All this without ever succumbing to the didactic and descriptive.