In the years that followed, String fellow returned to the area to shoot photos for her master’s thesis exhibition with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she later turned into a book titled, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005. Her stark, saturated photos documented the tragic consequences of overdevelopment: fish carcasses rotting on the water’s surface; a rusting bus sinking into a noxious red puddle; a snow goose slumped lifeless near the shore. “It was meant to be a mirror into the future,” String fellow told me.
In later projects, she examined the controversial environmental history of Los Angeles aqueduct system and documented the environmental justice battles along Interstate 5 in California. She recounted the cultural history of Wonder Valley’s homesteads, a physically demanding project that involved miles of walking in the desert to shoot photos of abandoned cabins. The project also included an audio tour, so people could see these places for themselves.
The Mojave Project is her longest and most involved work. It has no end date, in part to reflect the ever-shifting nature of the Mojave — the way time in the landscape feels nonlinear, layered. Checko Salgado, a photographer from Las Vegas, told me that the photos are “like she shoots from the hip,” documentation the focus, not necessarily aesthetics. Take, for example, a photograph of a pile of spent heap leach — rocks and other waste left over from cyanidation, a heap-leaching method that uses aqueous cyanide — part of a three-part series on gold mining. In the foreground: a dirt road with tire tracks, and a rusty chain-link fence with a sign reading “No hunting or trespassing.” In the background: the pile, a brown hill dotted with shrubs. The photo would be unremarkable without the context; in the caption, String fellow writes, “Notice how the mountain of ore has been graded to appear more ‘natural.’”
String fellow’s work, which she calls a social practice, crosses disciplines, incorporating geography, ethnography and biology, though she’s formally trained in none of those fields. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research-based arts organization that examines the relationships between humans and nature, has long been a model for her. The organization has led trips, including a 2009 boat tour through Houston — Texas’ “petrochemical artery” — and it creates virtual and gallery exhibitions, using sound recordings, photos, maps and videos to address themes as varied as the ways in which landscapes influenced American presidents and industrial fertilizer production.
According an art historian who has taught at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, String fellow’s work can feel overwhelming: There is so much information, and some of it, like hydrology and the mechanics of mining, can be dense. Forty-four essays, 26 audio recordings and more than 100 photos are available on her website, in seven print books, and, occasionally, in exhibition settings. And her subject is impossibly large. Inevitably, String fellow leaves out stories and perspectives. (Absent from the project, so far, is a dispatch on Las Vegas, a major Mojave city.)
Yet taken in at a slower pace, each piece of the work unearths another layer of the Mojave’s complexity. String fellow sees her audience as general, made up of desert dwellers and aficionados, though she’s pleased when experts respond to her work. Recently, a professional water manager reached out to say he’d shared her dispatch on the overused, drought-shrunken Colorado River with his colleagues.
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