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 have sustained biodiversity serving as touchstones for human migration, their life-giving presence woven into cultural reverence for water. Today, this connection is fading.
Hidden Waters is an ongoing photographic project that explores 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. This awareness deepened through conversations with intertribal Water Keepers, who spoke of ancestral springs vanishing — not only a physical loss, but a spiritual and cultural one unfolding 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 more than ecological markers; they are living archives of both natural and human histories as stories embedded in landscapes. I am interested in how photography can serve as an instrument of ecological memory, resisting the erasure of change through awareness and cconcern. Springs can still hold a possibility of renewal, with care and perhaps reverence in a rapidly changing world.