Del Valle, Eduardo and Mirta Gomez. Fried Waters. Photographs of Yucatan, Mexico by Eduardo Del Valle and Mirta Gomez.

Nazraeli, 2005. First edition. Introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth. Hardcover, cloth with tipped on original C print on front cover, not issued with dust jacket.  40 color plates, landscape studies of salt flats, on Japanese paper.  SIGNED by both photographers, who are married.  Issued in an edition of 1,000 of which 25 were special edition with a loose C-print and possibly a slipcase.  This standard edition copy is good with wear at spine tips and repair to front hinge, protected with custom made polyester jacket.  Photos of covers accompanying this listing are without the polyester jacket. Oversize. Summary:

Fried Waters is a large-format photographic monograph published in 2005 by Nazraeli Press in association with The Joy of Giving Something, Inc. The book presents an extended body of **color photographic work made in the Mexican state of Yucatán between 1998 and 2004, focusing on the ancient, ongoing practice of salt production at traditional collection sites such as Xtambú and Dzilám de Bravo on the peninsula.

Rather than serving as straightforward documentary images, the photographs in Fried Waters explore the process of transformation — water into salt — and the visual and symbolic qualities of that natural and laborious phenomenon. This theme of change and elemental process is emphasized throughout the book, which is organized into sections that reflect different aspects of this environment and activity — often referred to in descriptions as The Pit, The Edge, and The Lagoon.

Del Valle and Gómez are a long-term collaborative artistic team, and for this project they employed a shared working method: using identical medium-format cameras and tripods, making images of the same places, then mixing their films and prints so that the individual authorship of specific photographs is indeterminate. This collaborative process reinforces the unified visual voice of the work.

In essence, Fried Waters is a visual meditation on salt, landscape, and transformation, using photography to reveal the beauty and complexity of an ancient industry still practiced within the Yucatán’s unique environment.