PHOTOGRAPHY > Soda Lake Graveyard, 2013

I spent a full day on Soda Lake in the Carrizo Plain, CA, digging into the salt crusted surface and pulling out hunks of salt. I pushed them back into the place where I dug them out, but upright instead of flat. They stick up out of the thick mud beneath the surface. I made as many of these temporary "gravestones" as I could in a day, and photographed the landscape in four shots before the sun set. This salt gets absorbed back into the surface, so for me this was a temporary memorial / monument to the Chumash and Indigenous peoples who once lived here.