TECOPA HOT SPRINGS
Five bathers, mostly nude, one wearing long sleeves and a black beanie, lounge among ocher and brown reeds, the murky water of the hot springs coiling through sand. A blue camp chair draped with a towel stands nearby; behind it, clothing is piled on a rock. The water holds the image of a cloudy sky, muted blue rippling through white the texture of cotton balls. In the background, sand dunes are framed by towering navyblue mountains smeared with rusty pink. The hot springs appear isolated; there is no other water. The undulating, arid landscape extends to the edge of the frame, hinting at the desert that lies beyond.
PAHRUMP
In early fall, Kim Stringfellow, a landscape photographer, camped in the Pahrump Valley, a stretch of the Mojave Desert just over the Nevada border, near a fenced-off solar facility owned by a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, a Florida-based company. The Yellow Pine Solar project was still under construction, and partially assembled solar panels gleamed in the late afternoon light. Conservationists were there to protest the way they claimed it had destroyed Mojave yucca and disturbed the habitat of the protected desert tortoise, just as previous industrial-scale renewable energy developments had. Stringfellow, who considers herself an environmentalist, gave a brief speech before the assembled activists and writers about energy extraction in the desert. Consumerism, she said, was fueling our need for energy. “We can cover the entire planet (in solar panels),” she said, “but it will never be enough.”
Stringfellow spoke of her own sprawling Mojave Project, an ever-growing art project that includes a reported essay and a photo series about industrial solar development in the desert. “The work I’m most interested in is work that is about the environment,” she told me. “It’s art as activism.” To Stringfellow, Yellow Pine and similar developments reinforce an anachronistic stereotype of desert as wasteland, desert as barren, a landscape from which humans could take and take until there was actually nothing left. To counter that stereotype, Stringfellow, who is 59, has dedicated much of the last 25 years to documenting the complexity of life — both human and nonhuman — in the Mojave and Colorado deserts.
Using photography, her primary medium, as well as audio, video, and essays written by herself and others, she examines
