Uneven encounters

2014—2021

"The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again."

— Cormack McCarthy, The Crossing (1994)

"We are husbands to razed hillsides, wives to drowned bridges."

— Sherwin Bitsui, Dissolve (2018)

Places are animals: we encounter them unexpectedly and on terms that are not entirely clear to us. Foreign and inarticulate, they present us with semiotics unlike our own, our efforts to understand them now scattered across a variety of sciences, arts and fields. We don't even know which part of it is important.

Uneven Encounters is a series on dry badlands — places of high surface erosion, sparse regolith, minimal vegetation and rare, but intense rainfall — and how being ill-suited to large permanent settlements surfaces an inherent otherness of the land. It was shot in the various ecoregions of the American Southwest.