Texas Trigger

In May 2024, Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli traveled across Texas at the height of the U.S. presidential election campaign. In just over a month, they covered around 8,000 kilometers, documenting a wide variety of environments throughout the state: cities, suburbs, rural and industrial areas, and border zones.

Today, Texas represents one of the most privileged vantage points from which to observe and understand some of the crucial dynamics shaping contemporary American society: immigration policies, the proliferation of firearms, political and cultural tensions, and the ongoing clash between conservative ideals and progressive movements.

The book is divided into chapters that follow the chronology of events and encounters during the journey. However, there is no table of contents to separate them schematically; instead, the work unfolds as a continuous photographic sequence, in which each part flows into the next through a visual trigger, a threshold that signals the transition from one chapter to another. Beyond referring to the mechanism of a firearm or the device that activates the photographers’ camera flashes, the trigger is also understood as an activator that disorients and provokes an emotional response.