Overview

Brave River is a collaboration between borderland-based photographer Todd Morten and award-winning author, Tim Z. Hernandez. Inspired by Morten's years-long project of documenting the faces and landscapes of the El Paso and New Mexico region. Hernandez's writing is a series of epistles, meditations, and voices that offer stark portraits of the people, and the pulse of a region that is too often misunderstood and singularized in popular narratives. Told in thirty-nine gorgeous full-color photographs, the poems coincide, echo, and in some cases disrupt the imagery in a way that is meaningful and revealing.

Full Product Details

9781957840451

Table of Contents

Reviews

""El desierto / it is within us. / The vastness is our inheritance."" So begins the interweaving of words and photographs in this magnificent collaboration between Morten and Hernandez. Both photographs and poems help capture the essence of a difficult and always timely borderland, the way people live, toil the earth, and survive no matter the odds. Todd Morten's photographs, whether portrait or landscape, offer a sparse simplicity that renders a quiet but dignified record of daily life. Tim Z. Hernandez's poems loom large as a testament to the resilience of our people in an often perilous and unwelcoming environment. This is a triumphant book of the human spirit in a land where myth and memory dance and kick up quite a bit of tender dust that will make you smile and cry at the same time. -Virgil Suárez, author of Amerikan Chernobyl and Red Faced Poems The border and its people often have a narrative draped over them-over us. Like a heavy blanket we find hard to wrestle out from under. Todd's photographic works help to unfurl those perceptions and show what life is like along the border. And with each still moment, we are invited into the warm color of the desert, to sit with friends in an underpass, or to float the river with a smile. Welcome to la frontera. Tim Z. Hernandez's words bring life to these moments in time and root the reader straight into the dirt and dust on the border. Through his words, we find humanity and vulnerability often lost in the border story told by others. -Patrick Gabaldon, El Paso Artist Todd Morten and Tim Z. Hernandez have conjured up a book of poems and imagery as elusive as a Texas dust-devil, touching down in sand and dirt, disappearing, dancing in the wind, faces and hands weathered and worn, the future and past conjoined in a regional Tex-Mex dish flavored in pain and history. Read it a few times and it'll start to sing and you'll see blue. -Jon Jost, Filmmaker

Author Information

Tim Z. Hernandez is an award-winning author, performer, and documentary filmmaker. His work includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of the American Book Award and the International Latino Book Award. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, C-Span, NPR's Latino USA, and many others. In 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his research on locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, the incident made famous by Woody Guthrie's song of the same name, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You, and the sequel, They Call You Back. Hernandez holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Literature from Bennington College, and he is an Associate Professor with the University of Texas El Paso's Bilingual Creative Writing program. He lives in El Paso, Texas with his two children. You can find more info at www.timzhernandez.com Todd Morten grew up in Nebraska and Texas and has been a photographer and filmmaker for thirty years. His films have screened at festivals and theaters, including his 2003 film COTTONWOOD, which in 2007 screened at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, and his short film LAZARUS NO. 3, which was a short film finalist at the 2011 Sioux City International Film Festival. In recent years Morten has focused almost exclusively on still photography work, including documentary projects as well as experimental and abstract image-making. His main areas of interest are his own family and the people and landscapes he encounters wherever he happens to be. These days Morten lives in far west Texas with his family. This is his first photography book.

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