Water is important to those who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
- Joan Didion, "Holy Water"
Since its heyday in the 1960s, California’s engineered water system has represented the apex of a certain human impulse to control water and put it to use—to “reclaim” it from nature’s wastefulness, in the language of natural resource management agencies. But half a century on and the hangover has set in. In 2022, a 1,200-year megadrought that strained California’s aging water infrastructure to the breaking point gave way to two consecutive years of storms that have busted through levees, toppled seawalls and flooded huge swathes of the state. As painful as these climate change-driven disasters have been, they’ve only revealed vulnerabilities that have been there all along. Droughts and floods have always defined California’s climate, long before it was called California. The real disaster has been believing our infrastructure would always protect us.
In the years since I started work on Watershed, I’ve watched California reel from one water-related catastrophe to another. In addition to droughts and floods, these have included wildfires, landslides, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination, toxic dust storms and municipal water shortages. I didn’t set out to survey the state's water system through the lens of acute disaster. At first, I shot around its most obvious environmental signifiers, dwelling instead on how strangely and heavily all this infrastructure has come to rest upon the land. In this sense, I wasn’t interested in the story of how climate change has damaged the water system so much as how the water system itself has been an agent of ecological damage.
And yet, the geography of climate disaster is inescapable. Watershed constitutes a visual record of how and where water moves across California, from the pristine headwaters of its rivers through terraformed aqueducts and manufactured lakes, all against the backdrop of a sublime if ever-threatened landscape.
This portfolio shows a small representative selection of images from the larger Watershed project, which is ongoing.
I made this short documentary movie about time I spent photographing Tulare Lake in California's San Joaquin Valley.
My first trip on December 30, 2022 focused on the industrial-sublime landscapes of the mostly dry lakebed, drained and channelized by the J.G. Boswell Company (and others) in the 1800s to create one of the world's largest cotton empires.
I had no idea what was coming. The next day, on New Years Eve, the skies over California erupted with a series of storms that would last the better part of 3 months. The state saw widespread, catastrophic flooding.
On a blisteringly hot day in July 2023, I went back to see Tulare Lake again, this time resurrected.
