The title of Cyrill Lachauer’s exhibition “What Do You Want Here” is a phrase the German artist heard often as he traveled through neglected, sometimes impoverished regions of the American West and along the Mississippi River. There, he made films and photographs that he calls “narrative landscapes,” inhabited by the cultural and historical references that initially preoccupied him as a student of ethnology—a discipline he ultimately abandoned in favor of the radical subjectivity of making art.

His film Dodging Raindrops—A Separate Reality, 2016–17, retraces the steps of Carlos Castaneda from Los Angeles to Nogales, Arizona—as recounted in A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971), one of the fictional works that Castaneda passed off as serious anthropological study. It includes a series of vignettes featuring characters whose largely staged performances anticipate the potentially exploitative gaze of both the artist and the viewer. A group of hopeful rap musicians chide the camera for looking for killers and yellow tape before launching into an original song celebrating street life; a homeless man pushing a shopping cart down a lonely street in Fresno, California, recites an altered version of a classic American childhood rhyme: “Yo, black man, / black man, / tell me what you see. / I see a white guy here looking at me.” Later, a Vietnam vet who makes a precarious living posing as a Native American shaman on the Oregon–Nevada border dramatically recalls bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder. Punctuated by poetic verse authored by Lachauer and narrated by a gravelly voice belonging to an undocumented American immigrant living in Berlin, the film records the artist’s trajectory through scenes of natural beauty and social decay, while registering the dubious nature of the medium’s documentary claims—its source material as contrived as Castaneda’s Don Juan.

Rather than appearing cynical, this approach aspires to an honesty so brutal it is almost disingenuous. The title of the photographic series “The Adventures of a White Middle Class Man (from Black Hawk to Mother Leafy Anderson),” 2016–17, highlights the pitfalls of representing a culture other than one’s own, a dilemma embedded in ethnographic practice and revisited in what Hal Foster has called the “quasi anthropological paradigm,” in which “the site of artistic transformation . . . is always located elsewhere, in the field of the other.” Portraits of people are sparse among these images, which follow an itinerary beginning on the upper Mississippi, where the Sauk leader Black Hawk unsuccessfully resisted encroaching white settlement in the early nineteenth century, and moving all the way down to New Orleans, the birthplace of Mother Leafy Anderson’s Spiritual Church Movement, which claimed the Sauk warrior as its patron saint. While certain encounters with fellow travelers and drifters or inhabitants of places encountered en route are excerpted in an accompanying newsprint journal, the photographs mostly show scenes of abandonment: a burlap sack propped up against the base of a small bridge like a pillow; a crippled sedan parked lopsidedly on the edge of a flooded meadow next to a white mare craning her head backward to peer at the camera; elderly female hands cradling a Styrofoam cup of shaved ice stained bloodred. Shot at close range, such objects are suspended in a landscape revealed through allegorical fragments, itself part of a history marked by colonialism, slavery, and the suppression of autochthonous cultures and ways of life—but also by tenacity and perseverance.

As a modern-day embodiment of settler aggression (and fear), a man dressed in flannel holds a long-range revolver as he contemplates a blurry landscape from behind a shabby wooden fence. The figure also acts as a contrast to the photographer—the nomadic observer, perpetual outsider, and self-conscious road-tripper—who endeavors to immerse himself in scenes geographically and culturally remote from his own origins. But perhaps the camera is a kind of weapon, too? In a scene from the film showing discarded rowboats and furniture scattered around an abandoned hunting lodge on an Apache reservation, the narrator says, “In the manner of most hunters / before me / I take a picture / give nothing in return.”

—Michele Faguet