The American photographer Phyllis Galembo is especially interested in costumes.  She’s traveled through West Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean to document people dressed for ceremonies and celebrations.  And she collects vintage American Halloween costumes.  Her new book, “Maske,” surveys work from the past twenty-five years.  At first glance the color photographs fall somewhere between ethnography and art photography.  Although they have rich documentary value they’re highly composed.  Galembo crops images so that the figures fill the frame, with minimal depth, and depicts colors with a bright, crayon-box immediacy.  Her work isn’t troubled by the post-colonial tensions that Irving Penn’s portraits of Africans are, or the complications of subjectivity that Diane Arbus’ are.  Galumbo faces those she’s photographing simply; she serves them well.

The pictures are arresting.  (I’m tempted as I never have been before to bust out of this format and post more than one.)  There’s something uncomfortable about looking so closely at people whose faces are covered, because we want to know who they are.  And the clothing is mesmerizing.  It’s been executed with a couture-like purity of vision and technical finesse.  There are people here that I won’t forget: two men dressed like trees, a group of boys slathered with martian-green and blood-red body paint, three men in head-to-ankle striped, knit bodysuits.  In these photographs appearances go deep.