Dead Desert Night Info

Statement

Dead Desert Night is the first photobook by Arizona photographer Matthew Besinger, currently living in New York City. Its 160 pages present a conceptual creation-tale of the American West: how the land, from its discovery, was encountered as some grand void pending human circuits of road, canal, rail, electricity, gas, mining, planting, harvesting: expansion. Offstage the Sonoran Desert remains quiet and fragile, a silent relic and symbolic backdrop to the kaleidoscopic plot of machine, organization, purpose. This nightmarish conflict can only fold one way: the desert must be abstracted for civilization to be made real. The process of abstraction is the focus of the photos- and the book is a trail that leads to the new manmade desert.

The photos nest in the lurching edge of growth- the places where expansion collides with the land. The nighttime setting amplifies the desert calm by voiding it of people- posing a contrast between the noisy debris of expansion and the minimalism of nature. The contention of the pictures- their feeling of unease and malaise- is more a war of abstraction: of strange machines, unlivable homes, experimental fields; the mechanics of man seeming ten-times stranger than the Sonoran Desert, perhaps the most peculiar area of the country. Near the end of the book we find glimpses of virgin desert- right before the cotton comes- and those vistas present an island amidst a torrent of fractured views of the damage that’s been done.

These peculiar photographs get much of their charge by mining the perilous vein between document and fantasia. Other than the front- and end-piece, nothing is staged. A small range of limitations was adopted for creative focus: one camera, a repeated networks of roads, trails, rails, exclusive use of film negative, long exposure, etc. Light was never added to enhance the impact of a scene nor were crops used to underscore a specific area of view. Photoshop is at a bare minimum. Sites were never even scouted during daylight hours, when they would have been easier to find. The desert does all of the work: the dark nut groves full of twisting startrails; industrial sites overblown by arc-lamp; highways dimly lit in orange sodium-vapor and dressed in white and red streaks by passing cars/truck. The desert also carries the story: cactus plants backlit not by gauzy sunrise but by satellites and airplanes; telephone poles and electrical towers sprouted to gargantuan size, dwarfing the saguaro which were forever the tentpoles of a desert canopy. The orange groan of distant cities replace the fabled sunset on nearly every horizon.

The book runs like a harvester: using photography, painting, essay, animation, and video to offer an inclusive vision of the desert night. The photographs carry the charge but the mix amplifies everything: plot, context, voyage, fantasy. The Maps play a significant supporting role. Working like illustrations in a traditional piece of fiction, they highlight specific themes and operate as chapter divisions between photo groups (Rail Map, Cotton Map, etc.). The West is synonymous with expedition and so the reader is offered a set of dreamguides for the passage. They also serve as personal geography: memory-Maps of what Besinger encountered in the process of picturetaking. Collaborators were encouraged to bring something new: accordingly, all have lived in the Sonoran Desert. Paul Kerschen’s Introduction uncovers time as the book’s major theme- the pictures acting like oracles, showing the desert’s vacant present and boding of an empty future. The flipbook animation of frequent collaborator, Nicholas Zeltzer, brings playful relief that only ends in disaster: the trail of that little train underscoring the overreach which compounds the problems out West; a track laid into oblivion. Finally, Chris McCaleb documents the desert with videostills. His technique- casual, offhand- produces an eerie edit, much in-line with the photos: the desert seems to echo no matter how it’s recorded.

Dead Desert Night is at once a document, a critique, a bright nightmare. It begins at sleep, in a bedroom lit by the white light from under a bedcover. At the foot of the frame are copper cutouts of railroad ties, a train, that revolver. On the wall, a wooden crucifix. Worn-out tokens? Talismans? Maybe, but they’re also debris from a story that’s cycling in on itself. The ensuing photos criss-cross barbed-wired ranchland, riding down practically every road in Southern Arizona and climbing up through a hatch of mountain ranges only to come back down along irrigation canals of the Salt and Colorado Rivers- waterways which allowed all of this to happen. And finally, eventually, we’re on into a patch of undeveloped land and some lone cactus whose destiny is peril. There the view grows black, deadpan, until entering the cotton oasis at the center of everything: here, bright light and fruit and electricity and a desert reborn as something new. White blankets of man-planted snow closing the West, primed to shower the empire in some surreal tickertape parade.

Book Credits

Five casebound copies, each with a distinct monobow inlaid on its cover (one of: red, orange, green, blue, violet).

• Printing by Arizona Litho (Tucson)
• Binding by Roswell Bookbindery (Phoenix)
• Cover by Icon (Los Angeles)

The books were produced under the auspices of Attic Slope, Besinger’s imprint. He is responsible for the photography, painting, inlays, layout and design.

Matthew Besinger is a photographer living in New York City and Tucson, Arizona. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and Dead Desert Night is his first photobook.

Paul Kerschen is a novelist and musician living in Berkeley, California. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a PhD candidate at UC-Berkeley.

Nicholas Zeltzer is an animator-turned-lawyer living in Champaign, Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and received his JD from the University of Illinois.

Chris McCaleb is a filmmaker living in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Loyola Marymount (CA) and director of the Emmy-nominated webseries, Prom Queen.

The Maps

Each Map is a collage of five to twelve paintings. The paintings were made in acrylic on clear animation cells, then digitized, replicated, and collaged using InDesign. Each painting is based on one photo: one hundred and thirty cells exist but only seventy were used in the final book. The selection of paintings available for each Map was limited to the chapter it presents (e.g. the Cotton Map is constructed only of paintings based on the cotton photos). The Maps are huge: they could be printed to 36x72in. Intended output would involve digital ink-on-paper.

Prints

Eight images from the book have been brought to display size and are available for view. The images were shot on medium format negative on Kodak Portra and T-MAX; the current size is 40x48in, as Digital C-Prints. The run of photographs for the book were wet-mounted and scanned for large-format output at a final image size of 12,000x12,000px (144 megapixels) without interpolation.

Cotton Monster

The Cotton Monster is 7ft tall, made of 2x4s and steel hinges, wrapped in chickenwire and clothed in a bale of raw Pima cotton; internal fluorescent lights make it glow at night. Breaking the documentary restraint of the project, a photo of the Cotton Monster appears as an afterward: the changes of the outside drawn inward, the new desert come home.