Desert Wild Life

The third and final book in the Arizona Road Dust series

Everyone, and everything, in Arizona has a story – even the dust.

My newest book Desert Wild Life is finally available. It is the third and final book in the Arizona Road Dust series, named after an ISO standard contaminant mined in Arizona and used for decades to test car parts and weather sealing. An aging engineer first told me about Arizona road dust while on a golf course in Rochester, two months before I moved to Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun.

I have come to see the pictures I made over the next two years as guided by the idea of a place built, from the ground up, of stories. Arizona’s legends aren’t old enough to be myths, but they are present in every aspect of life. From the Superstition Mountains (named after rumors and whispers of disappearing treasure hunters) to the adventures of Wild West cowboys and outlaws, these stories allow thousands of Phoenix-area transplants, seasonal tourists (disaffectionately known as “snowbirds”) and locals alike to locate themselves in a grand narrative.

Even I needed a story – when asked what I was taking pictures of in Arizona, I would talk about road dust and the strangeness of how an industry found a way to extract and profit off of even the dust in an already ecologically exploited region. But I’m not an environmental resource scientist, nor do I truly understand what goes into making desert sand into a standardized substance. I realized only later that I needed a story to situate and understand myself in Arizona, just like everyone else. My story was about extraction; not just about others collecting dust and digging minerals up from the land, but how taking pictures and retelling stories is its own type of mining, and I had resolutely laid claim. The goal certainly wasn’t to make a profit and the ethics were less questionable, but I was mining nonetheless, sifting through that red sand for pictures and stories that revealed what is underneath the cultural landscape of the West. The pictures tell a personal narrative of building an identity in Arizona while also searching for the underlying stories with which others build their own identities.

I don’t live in Arizona anymore but I visit often, and always there are new tales and tellings, floating in the breeze like clouds glittering dust.

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Desert Wild Life is available in a very limited edition of 15 via my website. 200 pages, 85 pictures, 2 short stories, one prose poem, all laser printed and hand bound with brass screws in my home in Philadelphia. A digital edition will also be available once the physical edition sells out. You can also find the previous titles in the series and my other self-publishing ventures on my website.