In May 2024, Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli embarked on a journey across Texas at the height of the U.S. presidential election campaign. Over a little more than a month, they drove approximately 5,000 miles—documenting a wide range of environments across the state: cities, suburbs, rural and industrial areas, and the borderlands.

Today, Texas stands as one of the key vantage points from which to observe and understand some crucial dynamics shaping contemporary American society: immigration policy, 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 from the trip. However, there is no index to separate them schematically—instead, the work unfolds as a continuous photographic sequence, where each part flows into the next through a visual trigger: a threshold that signals the passage from one chapter to another. Besides referring to the mechanism of a firearm or the device that activates the authors’ camera flashes, the trigger is also meant as an activator that disorients and provokes an emotional response.

Translation and copy editing by Matilde Manicardi

Cover illustration by Giovanni Pallotta

Design, text, and captions

by Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli