American photographer Jack Spencer is best known for his depictions of life in Mexico and the American South. His images emphasize the human subject, the landscape, and the relationship between them. “I believe that all work is portraiture and, in its most pristine and honest form, I believe it is self-portraiture,” he has said. With a painter’s sensibility, Spencer uses meticulous darkroom processes, often painting and adding mixed-media glazes to his photographs. These techniques allow him to add a mythic and hyper-expressive quality to his images that the camera alone cannot produce. Spencer is best known for his “Apparitions” (2004), a series of over 75 magical realist portraits and landscapes influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.