Excerpts from Paul Kerschen's Introduction to Dead Desert Night

(on: time)
If the technique of these photographs serves to jolt us out of time, still more does their topic. Again and again we see the speechless persistence of human things after humans have left them. The dark windows of sheds and trailers reflect the outdoor glare; corrugated roofs sag; fields stretch untended; construction sites bristle metal rods, with their machinery at rest; a vacant tent advertises onions; a power station rises bright and motionless over the scrub. A train streaks through a silent rail yard, lit up like a battleship, with no origin or destination in sight. A dead tree frames a pile of ruined furniture warning away trespassers with a hand-lettered sign. Vehicles rest like sleeping animals in the dirt. At times this blank landscape recalls the distant past; thus the stark monochrome image of a saguaro under the stars suggests a relic from the time when cameras were first brought to the desert. But the corollary of an empty past is an empty future, and many more of these photographs seem to point forward in time, to suggest the future contained within the present. For we are certainly in the present moment, with all its infrastructure at work; goods move by rail, current runs through the cables, the lights are shining. But with no one present to explain them these objects lose some part of their intelligibility; they seem distant even as they lie directly before us. Their meaning has vanished over the horizon, with the city lights, or else that meaning lies in the past; for often we seem to view the present moment through the lens of a depopulated future.

(conclusion)
The most significant changes to the desert in recent decades—those cities which, every time I visit, have sprawled farther into the land—appear only indirectly in these photographs, as radiances streaming from outside of the crop marks. But they are the center around which all else clusters. It is these cities that send the trains along their lonely courses, that bring forth the agricultural stations and power plants and transmission towers. Nor are the cities exempt from the warning of future ruin. The water and power and dry goods that come out of the landscape bring a message with them, a message that is the sadness of desert cities, their half-acknowledged understanding that they have no right to be there. The endless brown networks of housing divisions, the regimented cars in oceanic lots, the miles of sidewalk and fence and stone wall that run along the megastores and office complexes—all the things that Besinger does not show us, since we are numb with constant exposure to them—rest in the shallowest soil. From a distance, in the dark, we get a glimpse of the structure beneath.