by Erin Michaela Sweeney

From: Terrain.org

Napa, California–based artist known for multimedia installations, public art, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, Lewis deSoto revisits Southern California’s Inland Empire, where he lived the first half of his life. From his creative toolbox, deSoto grabs an old standby—his photographic lens—to articulate the 21st century present of the Inland Empire. He overlays the visuals with written filters of his narrative past to produce Empire: Photographs and Essays.

Though the subtitle lists photographs before essays, his personal history gives the volume its geographical structure and soul. He shares vivid memories, granting readers a chance to visit times and places, even certain mental spaces, of his Inland Empire universe from 1954 to 1981.

DeSoto, born in San Bernardino (60 miles inland from the nearest beach town), recollects his first home there. “I remember a backyard with a citrus tree, a small detached garage with my father’s 1929 Ford Model A pickup inside (in pieces). . . . My father built an expansive white wooden fence around the yard with hard-to-engineer Xs in its design. He poured a cement patio in the backyard and I remember the smell of curing concrete.”

The single-frame photographs appearing after his San Bernardino essay do not reveal the family’s 16th Street home of his toddlerhood. Instead, readers see a stand-in ranch-style house on North Pershing Street. Perhaps the 16th Street house no longer exists, or deSoto decided not to include it in this collection, which revisits some of the places he first photographed in 1979.

Cars are a frequent theme in deSoto’s essays. As he explains in the introduction, “Growing up, my consciousness was punctuated by the landscape, especially how it looked passing through a windshield. Cars were my window to the world, and it was glorious.” Read Rest of Review Here