Brad Temkin: The State of Water

A complex examination from the artist about the choices we have made about how to use our Western lands and the implications of those decisions…. The experience is one of immersion and disorientation, a series of otherworldly landscapes.

— Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography

David Maisel’s Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a vast military compound in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test, and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. 

The Pentagon granted Maisel access to Dugway to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and zones of toxic weapons deployment. Proving Ground is a critical response to the formal and political aspects of Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.” 

Limited edition of this book available HERE

By flying as low as five feet above the ground, and by using digital means to accentuate the fissures and marks he finds, Light becomes a kind of photographic detective. The clues were there all along, waiting to be revealed.

— Jonathan Curiel, SF Weekly

San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light’s fourth Radius book of his aerial survey Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West journeys into the vast geological space and time of the Great Basin—the heart of a storied national “void” that is both actual and psychological, treasured as much for its tabula rasa possibilities as it is hated for its utter hostility to human needs.

Twelve thousand years ago most of the Great Basin—that part of the country between California and Utah where water does not drain to the ocean—was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated historical lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. The shrunken remnants of Lake Bonneville today are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its eponymous salt flats, while the best known portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an alkali bed that floods and dries each year, creating the flattest topography on earth, home to the annual counterculture festival Burning Man.

Piloting his 600-pound aircraft at low elevations, Light explores this mythic space deeply and abstractly, finding in the emptiness as much evidence of our presence as absence—and revealing heretofore unseen palimpsests of vehicular and urban glyphics that come and go with the seasons. Reflecting Light’s ongoing survey themes of mapping, perceptual orientation, and human impact on the land, but in a newly minimal and psychological direction, Lake Lahontan | Lake Bonneville offers an elegiac and forceful look at the politics of erasure. 

Encapsulates a seven-year effort across 690 miles that functions equally as geographic survey, typology and endurance project.

Photography by David Taylor
Text by Daniel D. Arreola, Claire C. Carter, William L. Fox, & Rebecca Senf

Hardcover
11.25 x 14.25 in
336 pages / 279 images
Includes two fold-outs
ISBN: 97819344359080

Co-Published with the Nevada Museum of Art

Limited edition of this book available HERE

”Temkin’s clearly seen photographs offer hope as to our industrial future.”

— PhotoBook Journal

Photography by Brad Temkin
Text by John Rohrbach, Steven Peck, and Roger Schickedantz

Hardcover in clear lucite slipcase
11.5 x 12.5 inches
110 pages / 65 images
Includes 36-page booklet insert

ISBN: 9781934435946

Limited edition of this book available HERE