74.M4.Latin America: A Year, a Camera, a Road Trip

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.