Water Has Memory:

The Restoration of Burro Ciénaga

Most people have never heard of a ciénaga, Spanish for desert marsh. Unique and once widespread across the American Southwest, most no longer exist. We grow up in the landscape we inherit, accepting it as normal, unaware of any past abundance now missing.

Looking for a ciénaga to include in my long-term desert springs series, I found Burro Ciénaga in New Mexico. The ranch owners spent 22 years restoring the almost-extinct wetland on their land. They asked me to create a series showing the changes the restoration efforts created. Loss is easy to recognize once you know what was there, but recovery is slow and incremental, nearly impossible to witness at human scale.

After much experimenting with how to show subtle change in the landscape over time, I chose a diptych of past and present. I used the ranchers’ early 2000s black-and-white photographs showing a parched, devastated landscape then toned and set them onto a stained USGS topographic map of Burro Ciénaga, I had to walk into the ciénaga, getting my feet wet, before I understood what I was looking at. I made close-up color photographs of the same sites to bring people into my experience and make the changes feel immediate and alive. 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.