Rivers & Towns – Mark Steinmetz

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 bathe this southeastern U.S. 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, houses, and streets, and to show something of people’s inner lives. At the same time, I was trying to discover myself as a photographer”.

The 20-year-old Mark Steinmetz of that day was already establishing the themes and modes that would make him the photographer we know now: 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 without ever giving in to the didactic and descriptive.