Water Has Memory:

The Restoration of Burro Ciénaga

Most people have never heard of a ciénega, a Spanish word for wetland. Once widespread across the American Southwest, these spring-fed desert wetlands are 91 percent gone, and almost no one knows they existed. We accept the landscape we inherit as the one that has always been, unaware of any prior abundance.

Looking for a ciénega to photograph, I found one on a ranch in southern New Mexico. The owners had spent 22 years restoring their almost-extinct wetland. They asked me to make a series showing the changes their work had created. Loss is easy to recognize; recovery on the land is slow and incremental, nearly impossible to witness at human scale.

Each diptych pairs the ranchers' black-and-white photographs—toned and placed onto a stained USGS topographic map of Burro Ciénaga—with my color photographs of the same sites. Made in the early 2000s, their photographs show a parched landscape; mine don’t. I had to walk into their ciénega, getting my feet wet, before I understood what I was looking at. My close-up color photographs are meant to make the changes feel immediate. Two decades of recovery separate the panels. Some locations are now unrecognizable; in others, a cliff edge or a tree anchors past to present. The diptych holds presence and absence in the same frame: time made visible as loss, and as return. Water remembers.