74.M4.Latin America

74.M4.Latin America: A Year, A Camera, A Road Trip is a photographic memoir by noted photographer and author Richard Sexton. When he was 20 years old he made a road trip from Georgia, where he grew up and was living at the time, to Bolivia and back. Over a six month period in 1974 he traveled overland to every country in Central America, to Roatan Island in the Caribbean, and to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, in South America,. This would be his first major photographic project, intended to test his mettle as a photographer and determine whether photography would be his calling in life. The trip became a transformative event during which he developed a lifelong bond with Latin America. Many years later the experience would became influential to his 2014 book Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean Sphere.

Named after the year of the trip, the camera he took with him—a used Leica M4, and the destination, this is the story, in word and image, of his genesis as a photographer. It’s also a compelling portrait of Latin America in the mid-70s as seen through the eyes of a young photographer exploring the world for the very first time. And it’s a travelogue from another era when travel was truly an adventure, before mobile phones, the internet, GPS, and a host of other technologies made the world a much smaller, more connected, place.