Desert Legends

This collaboration with writer and ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan resulted in the book Desert Legends: Re-storying the Sonoran Borderlands (Henry Holt, 1994). The focus was the changing environment of the Sonoran Desert along the US-Mexico border and on the stories, old and new, that border inhabitants use to guide their existence in the region.

Desert Legends was a response to negative examples of the human-nature interface, a dominant discussion in the respective fields of environmental science and photography. The book’s combination of text and photographs considers the idea that if we want to alter the ways people live in their environment, we must first change the stories they live by. Rather than creating new stories, the book relies on existing stories about how cultures along the border have survived in long-term harmony with an extreme environment. These stories have been suppressed by misconceptions about the advances of modern technology and contemporary culture’s role as land stewards.  The book combines texts about the borderlands and its people with short photo sequences as visual parables.

The work from Desert Legends was ultimately absorbed into the large project Revealing Territory for exhibition and subsequent publications.