Why do we look at photographs? What drives the compulsion? I think there are several answers, of course. But chief among them is a desire to see things we haven't seen, to understand the world through someone else's eyes. Perhaps to read a visual language that will impact our own vision.

C�line Clanet's book Maz� contains a set of photographs made among the Sami culture in Northern Norway, at the outer edge of Europe. She is not from there, but managed to ensconce herself enough among the locals that the images have a ring of authenticity. And they are lovely, to be sure.



I've seen documentary films and TV travel shows that have visited this place before, so it was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Yet the quality of the photographs and the poetic use of symbols enabled me to enter into a different world as I turned the pages of the book. That is why we look at photo books, I think.



There are several images of people looking out into the world with binoculars, searching. There are dogs looking out into the distance as well, watching. And herds of reindeer that remind me of what the great buffalo migrations of the American West must have looked like 150 years ago. As many of the subjects are looking elsewhere, the few portraits that engage the lens have an extra charge.




Clanet's color palette and sharp lens work well, and her edit allows the story to unfold over the course of the book. The reindeer live and die. The red blood, when it comes, contrasts deeply with the stark white snow. And the encroaching elements of the outside world, like a branded carton of bananas, remind us that in the 21st Century, globalization, like water, always finds it's way. —Jonathan Blaustein