152 pages Photographs by Luca Santés, Marco P. Valli Text(s) by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli Designed by Giovanni Pallotta 27.5 x 24.5 cm Language: English Hardback Publisher: Cesura Publish First signed edition of 700 copies 2025
In May 2024, photographers Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli set out on a month-long, 5,000-mile road trip across Texas, traveling through cities and suburbs, industrial districts, remote rural towns, and the charged landscapes of the border region. Their journey unfolds at a pivotal moment in the U.S. presidential election cycle, capturing a state that has become a critical lens for understanding the forces reshaping contemporary America: contested borders, the normalization of firearms, ideological frictions, and the unresolved tensions between conservative identity and progressive change.
Structured in chronological chapters that follow the artists’ encounters on the road, but presented without explicit breaks, the book reads as an unbroken visual flow. Each transition is initiated by a “trigger”: a threshold image that shifts the narrative forward. The trigger evokes both the mechanics of a firearm and the flash that fires the camera, but it also serves as an emotional jolt, a device that destabilizes, activates, and urges the viewer to reassess what they see.
Dense, direct, and disquietingly vivid, Texas Trigger offers a portrait of a state, and a country, in transformation, revealing the atmospheres, contradictions, and charged symbols that define the American present.
