$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC
184 pages with 72 color photographs by the author and 4 color maps
12.0″ x 7.75″ (horizontal/landscape)
ISBN 978–1–938086–37–3
Published in April 2016
Distributed by The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
Watch a video of Stephen Strom talking about his photographs at Verve Gallery (click here)
by Stephen Strom
with poems by Alison Hawthorne Deming and an essay by Rebecca A. Senf
Strom’s spectacular photographs of Death Valley are a lasting tribute to one of America’s crown jewels!
Death Valley is the lowest, driest, and hottest area in North America. Located about 150 miles west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles. A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes Telescope Peak that towers over the valley at 11,049 feet elevation and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national monument in 1933 and expanded into a national park in 1994, its rugged yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts more than 1,000,000 visitors per year.
Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics, began traveling regularly there some thirty-five years ago. His acute eye for abstract, almost pointillist compositions not only reveals the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, but also takes in the vast, colorful sweep of land and sky as well as the land’s myriad details—volcanic cinder cones and sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains—that give the area its distinctive and varied character.
Strom’s photographs are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming’s original sequence of twelve poems, written for this book, that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. And Rebecca Senf’s perceptive essay situates Strom’s work within the canon of those photographers who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno. Death Valley: Painted Light is a book unlike any other about a landscape whose topographic relief and sheer beauty are unforgettable.
About
About the Author
Stephen Strom is both a research astronomer and fine-art photographer. His work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections, including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, the University of Oklahoma Art Museum, the Mead Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has published six books of photography, including three with the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo (1989), Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland, a collaboration with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock (2005), and Tseyi: Deep in the Rock Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, with Navajo poet Laura Tohe (2005).
About the Essayists
Alison Hawthorne Deming, an award-winning poet and essayist, is the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and poetry, the most recent of which are Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (2014) and Stairway to Heaven (2016). Her many awards include the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1987–1988), and a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Rebecca A. Senf, Ph.D., is the Norton Family Curator of Photography, a joint appointment at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her recent exhibitions include Debating Modern Photography: The Triumph of Group f/64, Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence; Edward Weston: Mexico; Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture; and Exposing Time: Capturing Change through Photography. Senf is the author, with Stephen J. Pyne, of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (2011).
Slide Show
Badlands, Golden Canyon IV 
Badlands, Twenty Mule Team Canyon II 
Badlands, Tecopa Hot Springs II 
Exiting Titus Canyon, Looking West II 
Hillsides, Little Ubehebe Crater 
Hillsides, West of Harry Wade Road Near Saratoga Springs 
Bajada, East Slope of Panamint Mountains 
Looking Eastward, Descending from Father Crowley’s Vista 
Hillsides, Near Emigrant Pass 
Mesquite Dunes 
Detail, Mud Hill, Twenty Mule Team Canyon 
Panamint Dry Lake
Praise
“This collection of Stephen Strom’s views of Death Valley from 1980 to 2014 combines two distinct types of visual discovery: first, revealing abstract patterns and designs woven into the landscape and, second, isolating the specific outlines of this renowned desert landscape. In bringing these two categories of a photographic image together, Strom celebrates the universal beauty of line, color, and pattern and simultaneously situates it within a distinct landscape…It is the Death Valley that has been seen by many, photographed by some, and presented here in thoughtful revelation by Stephen Strom.”
—Rebecca A. Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and Phoenix Art Museum, from her essay.
My Place
The sandstone was cold on my back, that early October morning. I lay there, opening myself to the Utah sky, imagining the infinite universe beyond, grasping for comfort in its vastness. I had come here to be with close friends and family, to reflect on how Karen, my late wife, companion, muse, and closest friend of 56 years, had touched our lives. She passed suddenly from this world five months earlier, and in my post-dawn reverie I recalled our last moments together.
Why come to remember in this place, an isolated rock promontory on Cedar Mesa, 1,500 feet above the eroded sandstone mesas and pinnacles of Valley of the Gods? We were both academics, citizens of a world of scientists, moving with ease among collaborators in Japan, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. Connected as we were with colleagues throughout the world and as peripatetic as our lives could be, there was no place, no land that we could call our true home. With one exception: the red rock country of southeastern Utah.
Neither of us were Westerners: I was born in New York City and Karen in eastern Oklahoma. We made our first visits to the Colorado Plateau in our early forties, when we began to explore landscapes of the Navajo Nation. Drawn to both the country and its people, we decided to offer our services to teach a few classes at Navajo Community College (now Diné College) in Tsaile, Arizona, during the summers of 1981 and 1982. We soon developed relationships not only with the land, but with a web of Native writers, poets, sculptors, and painters. Our scientific careers led us eastward to Amherst, Massachusetts, which was our base for 14 years. But throughout those years we were drawn to return to land we thought of as home: camping and hiking in southeastern and south-central Utah, capturing the landscape’s chromatic and sculptural rhythms in photographs and later joining those images with the work of Native poets Joy Harjo and Laura Tohe.
We also invited our children and grandchildren to join us in exploring the slickrock, hogbacks, hoodoos, rivers, and canyon labyrinths of what was slowly becoming “home.” They came, and some learned to love the land as we did. One is the essayist for this book and the author of its companion: Voices from Bears Ears Country: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. Rebecca: who hiked to White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly at the age of 4 and on a hot summer day in 1988 immersed her feet in the sands and waters of Chinle Creek—a baptism celebrating her joining the congregation of redrock worshippers.
Today, on Muley Point, she, a quarter-century older, stood nearby me, as we gathered our thoughts in silence—the majesty of the land compels no less. And in that silence she, too, I imagined, felt the power of this place, the sun, the sky, the rock, the San Juan River nearby. This promontory and the Colorado Plateau on which it stands, has borne witness to many changes: to the shift of tectonic plates that carried it on a journey of more than a billion years, starting from near the equator to where it stands today, some 5,000 miles to the north; to the uplift, which raised the Plateau from sea level to more than a mile above the oceans; to the arrival of megafauna and then man; to the rise of agricultural and then urban civilizations; to the coming of the Spanish and Mormons; to a gathering to remember the life of a scientist, mother, grandmother, colleague, mentor, muse, and companion. Such is the wonder and grandeur and solace to be shared in such a place.