Water in the West & the California Toxics Project
November 1 – December 1, 1990
Robert Dawson’s photography on water and its’ relation to power evolved from his travels throughout the West and later, to other parts of the world. Some of the work addresses the issues with irony. Some of the work looks at our desire to possess, control and shape the land and water to our needs. Some photographs document abuse while others examine a complex, evolving relationship to water that Dawson hopes to influence with his work.
Dawson began photographing water in the American West in 1983 and soon realized the enormity of the subject. By 1989, Dawson and his wife Ellen Manchester had organized a group of photographers to become a large-scale collaborative effort called the Water in the West Project. They worked together to systematically evaluate, photograph, and address issues surrounding western water. The project has established a permanent photo archive at the Center For Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and published two books, A River Too Far: The Past and Future of the Arid West (1991) and Arid Waters: Photographs From the Water in the West Project (1992), both by the University of Nevada Press.
For over twenty-five years, Dawson’s photographed issues of water and power in Mono Lake, CA; the Klamath River, CA; the Truckee River and Pyramid Lake, NV; California’s agricultural heartland called the Central Valley and other places of concern and conflict over water throughout the American West. In 2023, Dawson and Ellen Manchester, returned to the increasingly urgent issue of water in the West by photographing the astonishing re-emergence of the vast Tulare Lake in California’s San Joaquin Valley which had disappeared eighty years before due to agriculture and urban water demands. They also examined the origins of the catastrophic Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and current efforts to avert another water crisis in the future.
In 1999, Dawson traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia to explore the site of one of the most divisive wars of his lifetime. He used this trip to explore water in the broader international context of Southeast Asia. He saw that much of what he learned in the American West was relevant for other parts of the world as well. After his 2001 trip to India with writer Jacques Leslie, it became clear that the issue of water was global in scale, and he began his Global Water project. Dawson made explorations of global water to Iceland during the summers of 2004 and 2005 where he photographed the struggle over a vast dam complex in the Central Highlands. In 2006 and 2007, he photographed the oversubscribed Colorado River where it dries up in northern Mexico. He also photographed battles over indigenous water rights along the Chixoy River in Guatemala and water issues in parts of South America. It became clear to Dawson that these epic battles over water were symbolic of larger struggles over power being played out throughout the world. The images contained in this group represent some of the critical water, environmental and social issues of our time.
Robert Dawson was the recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Work Fund grant, a Graham Foundation grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize. His publications include Robert Dawson Photographs; The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland; Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream; A Doubtful River; The Public Library: A Photographic Essay; and Photographing Shakespeare: The Folger Shakespeare Library. Mr. Dawson’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He taught photography for over twenty years at San Jose State. He retired in 2018 after twenty-three years of teaching photography at Stanford University. He and his wife, Ellen Manchester, are collaborating on their long-term Global Library Project.