Obsidian Magazine 006 B. Traven

B. Traven is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. He spent the first half of his life in Germany and the second in Mexico, leaving a remarkable literary output of global reach: more than forty million copies sold, more than fifteen hundred editions, and translations into more than forty languages.

What is much less known is that Traven was an accomplished photographer.

A decisive moment in his photographic activity occurred in 1926, with his participation in an expedition to Chiapas organized by Enrique Palacios under the auspices of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This mission would lead to the book Explorations in the State of Chiapas, May–August 1926, published in 1929.

The expedition, initially focused on the study of locust plagues, brought together agronomists, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Traven's role as a photographer placed him at the intersection of scientific documentation and lived experience.

However, his work soon went beyond the strictly documentary function he had been assigned. He recorded not only the activities of the expedition but also the landscapes, architecture, and indigenous communities of the region, as well as the rhythms of daily life. Chiapas became a formative experience. Traven remained there for several months after the expedition concluded in August 1926 and returned on multiple occasions during the following year.

Today, approximately 3,000 photographs are preserved within the Traven archive, forming one of the largest known visual corpuses associated with a major twentieth-century writer. This body of work demonstrates a photographer with a disciplined gaze, a documentary instinct, and a deep engagement with the social and material realities that also underpin his literary output.

The selection presented by Obsidiana is part of a larger, ongoing project to catalogue and study this archive in its entirety, as a basis for future publications and exhibitions. More than offering a closed interpretation, this work seeks to open the archive, activate it, and make it legible from the present through continuous research and dialogue.

Far from being incidental, Traven's photography constitutes an integral part of his creative project. It prolongs and expands his literary work, offering a parallel mode of inquiry into the same world he sought to describe with words. Read alongside his writings, these images reveal photography not as an auxiliary practice but as another form of thought: one that allows us to delve more deeply into the material, social, and imaginative landscape that defines Traven's work.