Desert Videos

My first real digital video was done in the Mojave (but it was lost long ago); I’ve done a bunch more since then. The California and Nevada deserts (and, lately, the broader Great Basin deserts as well) have always fascinated and strongly attracted me (probably for all the wrong reasons), and while I’ve been taking photos of them for decades, it wasn’t until cheap digital video came along that I started making videos out there to document what I saw and felt about the desert. Some of the videos here obviously reflect the strong ambivalence I feel about the way humans have settled the desert and left so much wreckage and junk lying around (there’s a reason someone once jokingly summed up my photography as “dead cars in the desert”), but I try not to beat people over the head with it. My views are a lot less black-and-white than most people assume (enough so that I get flak from all sides) — there’s definitely real beauty and attitudes to admire in the strange juxtapositions of humans and deserts, and I hope some of that comes through here every now and then. If you’ve ever watched the wonderful documentary “Darwin” about the small Californian High Desert town of Darwin (a place I’ve been to a bunch of times, just passing through), you might recognize the phenomenon…