A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

I’m in the Mojave Desert an hour and a half from Las Vegas, far away from cell service and light pollution. The usual urban stresses and noises—of traffic, alarms, text messages and phone calls—are attenuated. For me, driving to a remote desert location is a welcome passage from cacophony and chaos to stillness and contemplation. When I arrive at a familiar jumble of boulders and turn off my car’s ignition, my surroundings are so quiet that I can hear my pulse beat, and, as I move, my clothing rustle and my shoes scrape against the ground. I set up my equipment. On the battered tripod facing me is a camera cobbled together from an old Canon lens and a recent Sony digital body, its remote trigger dangling from a wire at its side. I have arrived just before the golden hour, my favorite time in the desert because it’s a rapidly shifting multi-sensory experience: dusk flows slowly from the far hills, jumping across the contours of the land. The wind picks up briefly, then dies down. The air cools rapidly and moistens, and the nearby creosote bushes exude their distinctive scent. Joshua Trees—so strange to outsiders and sometimes overlooked by locals—dot the landscape around me, their uplifted greenyellow arms becoming spiky silhouettes as the light dims.

I begin to adjust my “frankencamera,” not knowing that this is the last time I will be able to capture this scene. Within weeks, this landscape will be torched by a devastating lightning-sparked wildfire that leaves husks of the more substantial trees and only dark smudges in place of the more fragile vegetation. Although I’m here specifically to capture an image of the NEOWISE comet before it leaves our skies, I’ve long appreciated these working trips into the desert as an opportunity to hone my skills. Capturing this comet late in its trajectory near Earth the way I want is a challenging task, at the limit of the camera’s and my abilities. It is a faint smear among the stars, so dim that the camera’s automatic systems—for focus, exposure, and stabilization— hinder rather than assist my photography and I have to switch them all off. NEOWISE is in an awkwardly high position in the sky, making it difficult to combine with the landscape in a single cohesive exposure. I must balance shutter speed, depth of field, and exposure settings to capture both landscape and comet while minimizing digital noise and star trails. I draw on my earlier low-light experiences to anticipate problems, identify solutions, and explore possibilities. But those experiences are in more predictable moonlit or light-painted scenes, not this type of landscape astrophotography. It’s also been too long since my last foray into the desert and my skills are a little rusty. The lengthy drive makes this a serious investment of effort geared towards exploring technical control and creative serendipity on location. images to find the comet’s position while fine-tuning the settings. It’s particularly difficult to focus in low light. One slight adjustment brings the distant landscape into focus, while another sharpens the ghostly Joshua Trees in the middle distance. Then I overshoot and the entire scene is blurry again. I adjust and repeat until my test scene is reasonably sharp and exposed, then switch to framing new compositions while compensating for the fading light.

Contemporary artists in the American Southwest benefit from an unusual creative laboratory environment: our vast, deceptively vacant desert landscapes that reward close observation and allow space to experiment. These artists are not the first to discover this potential. Indigenous peoples created rock art and large-scale intaglios throughout our region over the last few millennia; in the 20th century, land artists imposed their visions into the earth itself. While Nevada relies on businesses of resource extraction—minerals from the ground and paychecks from tourists and locals—our generation of artists focuses (for the most part) on projects with a lighter footprint that avoid damage to their subjects. This was apparent in two recent exhibitions at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art: Spirit of the Land, a collaboration of dozens of artists curated by Kim Garrison Means, Checko Salgado, and Mikayla Whitmore, and The Mojave Project, a transmedia documentary project led by Kim Stringfellow that weaves together multiple themes relevant to our desert. Both projects highlighted the value of Nevada’s non-urban areas for artists and documentarians, both relied on observations from specific desert locations, sharpening and recontextualizing them for formal viewing, and both, importantly, encouraged interactions with and among artists and community members.

I was honored to be part of Spirit of the Land, contributing a night photograph in the tradition of a shadow play but with desert flora rather than puppets as the silhouetted main “actors.” Lowlight photography, my area of emphasis, is a visual form that often documents places that audiences can’t easily travel to, during times they might not feel comfortable visiting. The practice emphasizes non-destructive and ephemeral techniques: the locations aren’t modified, and light painting adds elements that are fully visible only in a long-exposure photograph. While this approach might appear of interest mainly to hobbyists, my experience exploring them reflects the broader impact and relevance of our desert as a creative laboratory for the arts. Low-light photography is not just creating moody photographs in near-dark settings. Its techniques, and the tools created by its practitioners to support them, broaden what a photographer can capture: more naturalistic scenes, increased hours to photograph including dusk, dawn, and by moon or starlight, experimental representations of time and motion, and more subtle use of natural and artificial lighting. In our deserts, photographing at night is akin to using a large outdoor studio because of the ability to control lighting and the privacy afforded by remoteness.

It’s no coincidence that visual artists have pushed low-light boundaries over the last two decades: digital cameras have become increasingly light sensitive and digital workflows allow immediate review and adjustment after each shot. Tom Lowe’s 2012 low-light film TimeScapes, shot partly in Southern Nevada, was groundbreaking for its smooth movement through nightscapes. Troy Paiva light-painted abandoned sites in the American West for his Lost America project spanning film and digital photography. Many others have created compelling nocturnal visions, building on a century of work by photographers such as Brassaï, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Alfred Stieglitz, O. Winston Link, and Carlos and Miguel Vargas.1 In the tradition of these artists, my own work has presented our desert as a familiar-yet-alien nocturnal environment using immersive large prints and ambient audio in my Swatch-sponsored exhibit Time in the Mojave Although the American Southwest and Switzerland are thousands of miles apart, such visions of our desert—and those of other photographers such as Sharon Schafer, whose wildlife photography has led to international exchanges between schoolchildren in India and Las Vegas—challenge their viewers to reflect on our respective environments, climates, and human activities.

This careful, repeated experimentation combines a meditative flow with rapid adjustments—the longer exposure periods are necessary to verify potential compositions in detail, while the quick bursts of activity fine-tune the exposure settings. All the while, I try to avoid the usual visual flaws due to dust specks, bugs flitting near the lens, and dotted trails left by aircraft. And not only aircraft: on a recent night shoot, I capture what appear to be a group of stars parading eerily in formation across the sky. These turn out to be satellites recently launched by Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Back in the desert at dusk, my first challenge is locating NEOWISE while my night vision is still adjusting from the drive. My camera is more sensitive than my eyes right now, so I capture several test

1 For a historical and technical overview of night photography, see Lance Keimig’s “Night Photography and Light Painting.”

Of the dozens of resulting images I’ll capture this evening, just a few will be worth fine-tuning. I won’t substantially edit these images, though. My selfimposed constraint is to document scenes in-camera rather than manipulate what I saw in the field after the fact. This time, I will spend several hours to create one or two final NEOWISE images that I consider worth showing to others. Although the process of creating these works is rewarding, sometimes it produces no satisfactory photographs. If I were to focus only on the tangible results, I would question the effort and energy that goes into conceptualizing and creating such works. Will shooting NEOWISE be one of the last times I commit to this effort? As I’m standing in the dark in the flow of capturing, reviewing, and adjusting frame after frame, I’m reminded that any person can drive up, jump out of their car, raise a phone and capture a similar image with much less effort and time. Mobile phone cameras are getting that good at low-light photographs. The mobile phones’ democratization of photography automates workflows so profoundly and mysteriously that they are changing how photographers approach visual projects and complicating how we understand and articulate our creative processes.

In his 1951 novel Sheep Rock, George R. Stewart recounts the history of a remote Nevada location through the innovative approach of making place the protagonist observing eons of activity from geological shaping to generations of animal and human visitors. Stewart, an English professor at UC Berkeley best known for the haunting postapocalyptic novel Earth Abides, repeatedly visited the pseudonymous site with a rotating interdisciplinary group of colleagues, discussing their insights about the location while sitting around the campfire.

Stewart began to “get a picture of the playa, spring, and rock, in time as well as space. Later, poet of the place, he will weave his colleagues’ knowledge together” in the final novel.2

An art-infused version of Stewart’s place-based multidisciplinary approach is even more appropriate today: returning repeatedly to document a remote place in our region—and interacting with others regarding that place—can tease out subtle themes inspired by even seemingly mundane locations. As Sheep Rock indicates, the practices of art and research can be deeply intertwined—this is the focus of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, of which UNLV is a member. We are fortunate to have the desert as a laboratory to extend our senses and reflect on ourselves, our connections, and creative practices. I’ve seen many apparently minor scenarios that hint at deeper themes worthy of scholarly and creative exploration: the subtle ripples in gravel that are the only remains of a long-vanished desert railway, raising, for me, themes of transportation networks and regional economies; the evolving fire circle and graffiti that indicate an abandoned shell of a building is actually the site of sporadic social gatherings, suggesting themes of economic precariousness and outsider art; shattered bottle remnants on the upraised arms of a target-practicedamaged Joshua Tree, raising questions about the multiple uses of public lands and environmental stewardship; splintered lumber and deep ruts hinting at the struggle to lever a stuck vehicle from deep mud on a desolate road, suggesting themes of risk behaviors and vulnerable infrastructures. Each of these scenes is the imprint of human decisions in a place, each evidence of a distinct activity that can inspire creative works and research about how and why we interact with our lands.

For all its challenges, refining my photographic techniques and tools in the desert has encouraged me to look more closely at my surroundings while provided a calm space to explore beyond my usual practices. Photography under these conditions has led, both literally and figuratively, to different ways of seeing and documenting the world. A quick night snapshot using a phone might result in an image similar to what I create through my careful, controlled processes, but it is far less likely to create a rewarding connection to place and practice.

Place, practice, and introspection have a contested history in our region. Learning from Las Vegas, the provocative 1972 book by Yale professors and graduate students, famously challenged in both title and subject the then-popular notion that Las Vegas’s built environment had no valuable lessons for other locations.3 Now, decades later, it is more acceptable to make the case for our region’s relevance. UNLV scholars and Brookings Mountain West benefit from their Las Vegas and Southwest environs for their research. When President Obama designated the Basin and Range National Monument in central Nevada, he called it an “irreplaceable resource for archaeologists, historians, and ecologists.”

Even so, we still face challenges encouraging people to engage deeply with our Southern Nevada landscapes, which are vast, yet fragile and often overlooked by those who pass through or fly over them. Those who do pay close attention are traditionally a small and secretive lot: military and weapons testers, miners and ranchers, waste repository proponents and land speculators. And it’s sometimes not easy to travel in these remote areas: Nigerian Black Mountain Fellow Uwem Akpan describes a jarring encounter with a police officer who demanded he explain his destination during a night drive through the desert. “What are you doing in Vegas?”4

But in ways few other regions can, our stark landscapes nourish artists by providing space to ponder and practice. Art, at its best, encourages us to identify and question preconceptions; our desert setting provides ample opportunities to do so. What other state has so much public land to explore? Where else can one travel from a highly urbanized to isolated rural locations so rapidly? And what other changeobsessed locale offers so many opportunities to reflect on our past, present, and future?

One can see the results of such artistic efforts in the Marjorie Barrick Museum’s programming over the last few years. Its exhibitions are, intentionally, an excellent entry point to exploring art through the lenses of our region. Its opening receptions are opportunities to converse with an artist or fellow visitor about their relationships with our region and this influences their work. The diverse group of artists in Spirit of the Land represented similarly diverse perspectives on the proposed Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. The implicit message: if this group holds this many different views about a topic, then what of us, the viewers? What voice would you add?

3 For background on this work, see Avery Trufelman’s “Lessons from Las Vegas”