The Brooklyn Rail

West West is a pair of photobooks by Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud comprising work they made on a weeks-long journey across the American West. The two books are landscape-oriented with some strong portraits.

Setting out in March of 2024, Eisler and Riboud drove from Canyon Point to Houston, stopping at twenty-eight towns. The photographers were high school friends in France, but had not seen each other again until they reconnected for this journey. Though a collaboration of sorts, the similarities between their photos feel more happenstance than intentional. As a matter of process, neither showed the other their photos until the end of the trip. Multiple times they shot the same subject, in the same location, from the same direction, yet never rendered the same photo. In doing so, they revealed a formative tension in the conjoined body of work: their differing perspectives on the West.

In terms of the photos, Eisler’s lens wants it all. She shoots with a wide-angle, filling the frame with detail from edge to edge. View from the John Chamberlain Building (all works 2024) is a black-and-white vertical composition where most of the values fall to either black or white, leaving little gray. The bottom of the frame is filled with a stark-white building, while another building’s facade creates a sawtooth shape walking up the left side of the photo. The two structures combine to make a corner within the frame. Between this corner and the top right of the frame, there is a void-black sky and part of a cut-off white cloud. This image implies how much more is outside the frame by boxing you in with only parts of these vast objects. In doing so, it conveys the same dwarfing feeling as being under the grandeur of the West’s huge landscapes.

Riboud is more focused, the subjects of his vision—rusted car, motel sign, railroad—seem rooted to the ground, and there is an intently complicated geometry. In Presidio, TX, Riboud records two classical western houses placed firmly in frame with power poles, signposts, and deck supports all forming upward parallel lines while power cables slice the pale blue sky into triangles. The stillness seems to match the architecture of the western landscape. The geometry gives a sense of visual depth to Riboud’s photos, while the decaying human structures that he pictures highlight the complicated nature of our interactions with the West.

In his resonant foreword, Howard Greenberg commends Eisler and Riboud’s photographic abilities and reminds the reader that perception shapes action, dubbing this book an “explanation of how we see, experience, and remember the American West.” Altering perspective was the reason they took this trip in the first place. In her introduction, Carrie Scott admits that many photographers have offered a perspective on the West, yet Scott maintains that West West is not simply adding two more perspectives. By not showing each other their work, Eisler and Riboud avoided each other’s influence and thereby produced unique photographs. They took the same trip, traveled through the same towns, and even took photographs of the same things, yet they never made the same image.

Eisler’s photos feel more spontaneous; they allow the eye to travel through the image and rest on its focal point. Riboud, on the other hand, seems to carve what he wants out of the frame, leaving more empty space and lonely objects, creating a settled feeling of composed stillness.

In instances where these artists share a subject, like the “Lonely Sign” photos in Lobo, TX, you can compare a wide shot from Eisler and a smaller frame from Riboud side-by-side and see precisely how these artists differ. But it’s in images that don’t have a counterpart where the conversation between these two photobooks really picks up. Looking at Eisler’s photos after Riboud’s makes me want to find a smaller frame within them. Looking at Riboud’s photos after Eisler’s makes me think about how his composition speaks to the wider world he’s excluded yet reflects. In this tension, the reader is forced to acknowledge the possibility of the West under each artist, the possibility of a West of multitudes.

The crossroads Eisler and Riboud picture here is of the West on a needle’s point. Most of what humans have built is decrepit and abandoned, the vast nature is under threat. But that nature is still beautiful, and those structures still stand. In her introduction, Scott asks us to view both artists’ perspectives, to go between them, and in their difference, re-think our own understanding of the West’s myth, past, and future.