Joan Myers – författare

In low places consequences collect, and in all North America you cannot get much lower than the Imperial Valley of southern California, where one town, 186 feet below sea level, calls itself the Lowest Down City in the Western Hemisphere, and where the waters of the Colorado River sustain a billion-dollar agricultural industry. The consequences of that industry drain from the valley into the accidentally man-made Salton Sea, California's largest lake and a vital stopping place for migratory waterfowl. Today the Salton Sea is in desperate environmental trouble. Beginning with the Yuman-speaking tribes encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, deBuys traces the exploration and development of the region through the Gold Rush of 1849, the government-sponsored surveys that followed, and the inept tinkering with the river by an assortment of irrigation and development interests that resulted in the floods that formed the Salton Sea nearly a century ago. He introduces us to a gallery of rogues and dreamers who saw a great future for this arid wilderness but could never refrain from interference with the forces of nature.

With this haunting new collection of photographs, Joan Myers continues the decades-long journey she began in Where the Buffalo Roamed (with Lucy Lippard), documenting the changing landscape and culture of the American West. The images in this new collection are more personal, more elegiac-and all black-and-white. They bear witness to the fracturing of the American Dream, the demise of cowboy culture, and the shrinking of small towns, ranches, and farms throughout western rural America. The themes she examines are reflected in The Devil’s Highway, a powerfully evocative short story by Pulitzer finalist William deBuys, first published in 1992 in Story magazine and reproduced here for the first time. Myers and deBuys previously collaborated on Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, which inspired the highly acclaimed film, The Colorado.Myers has spent much of her time roaming the American West, but has also worked in India, the Canary Islands, Antarctica, Java, Sicily, Sardinia, Hawaii, and more. Her extensive photo archive is now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History on the University of Texas at Austin campus.

In Fire and Ice: Timescapes Joan Myers gathers volcanoes photographs of iconic sites from all over the world, including Volcano National Park on the island of Hawai'i, Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, Cotopaxi and Picincha in Ecuador, Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, Krakatoa in Indonesia and of course Mt. Etna and Pompeii. The work is breathtakingly beautiful, compelling and provocative by turns. Her essay reads like an adventure story, exploring the connection between fire and ice while describing her thrilling treks to ends of the Earth.