HIDDEN WATERS
Endangered and Disappearing Arid Land Springs
Beneath earth’s surface, a vast network of freshwater veins and aquifer pools emerge as springs. For millennia, they sustained biodiversity serving as touchstones for human migration, their life-giving presence woven into cultural reverence for water. Today, this connection is fading.
For nine years I’ve photographed endangered desert springs as both ecological realities and symbolic spaces — sites of fragility, memory, and disappearance. In the arid West, springs are lifelines: isolated sources of water that sustain an outsized amount of biodiversity. Today, many are drying up due to over-extraction, climate change, and neglect.
My connection to these landscapes began during years spent in a bone-dry Arizona town, where water scarcity shaped my understanding of place. Conversations with the indigenous organization the Water Keepers deepened this awareness; they spoke of ancestral springs disappearing — losses at once physical, cultural, and spiritual, carried quietly across generations.
What strikes me most is not only the physical disappearance of these springs, but the psychological one — the way memory fades: as each generation inherits a more degraded environment and accepts it as normal, forgetting the richer past — a pattern known as shifting baseline syndrome. By naming and witnessing this erosion of memory, we begin to reclaim a fuller understanding of what has been lost — and what might still be restored.
My practice sits at the intersection of art and ecology. Using photographs as a witness, I work in a site-specific mode, selecting springs based on their narratives, light, and mood. I chose the muted palette of Western landscape painter, Maynard Dixon to reflect the unusual beauty of springs and their frequently altered surroundings — beauty that conceals vulnerability and resilience.
Springs are living archives of human and natural history. With these images, I aim to preserve them as acts of ecological memory, resisting erasure while holding onto the possibility of renewal.