[gravel crunching] - It's kind of
a magical process, the photographing process. [soft music] Just follow me and I'll
let you know if I see a snake. - Okay. - I'll come out here. I'm looking at the light. I'm looking at the content. I'm--I'm thinking
about everything at once. In the end, I'm kind of
working it instinctively. All right. After all these years
of--of doing that, I'm--sometimes I can
feel the photograph. It's-I think it's, like, more like
the way a poem works. It's a number of words
together that once you put
them together, it kind of triggers things. It's not always obvious. It just keeps--it keeps haunting or hounding
you in a way. When I first started making
serious photographs, I wasn't thinking about
social documentary and political work, but because I was exposed
to everything around me, in the late '60s,
the whole world was just going wild with politics. I saw this kind of idea
of taking these tools, this language
of fine art photography and applying it to the street. And I began the "Telegraph
3 A.M." project that way. I think I was 20, 21 years old then, 22. That was kind of the first
major project that I really learned the language of photography
with that project, and it was by
kind of just going back over and over
and over again, just learning, making
mistakes and going back. But once the book came out, I started realizing
that I thought I was gonna change the world
with this work by showing people things that they
hadn't seen before. But in fact, it just
helped my career. That just felt--
that felt wrong. After "Telegraph 3 A.M.," when I was kind of
disillusioned with my own work, or
my effort, I said I'm not gonna
photograph people, and I was looking kind of in search
of the miraculous. Rather than thinking about
the political world, I wanted to go and remove
myself from it all and just go on this--
this journey. I just got this idea
one night. Cactus were these mystical
forms in the desert, and then I was gonna go
and photograph them, and I started photographing at night and experimenting. Not yet, but soon. I really like working
at night. It gave me a fresh language that very few people had
ever used in photography. That was that moment. That was--that was it. That was the turn--I'm
getting chills, actually. [solemn music] For me, that became a place where my mind
just--just took off. I had fallen in love
with the desert. I didn't know at that
point that I would ever be thinking about the political consequences of the desert. Those are not issues that were in my consciousness
at that point, and when I did go back
without a political agenda, then I started noticing things that I didn't
even think about. Things like military
bombing ranges, the nuclear test site, space shuttle landings, manmade fires,
manmade floods. I was constant reconciling this idea of the beauty
of the place and ugliness exist side by side in
the American desert west. The desert was a vast stage where everything
that happened there kind of projects onto
the rest of America. I was also at the
same time reading Ezra Pound's
50-year-long epic poem called "The Cantos," and the more I
thought about it, the more I realized that
what I was trying to do was create an epic poem
in photography, taking these photo essays, putting them together,
and renaming them as "Cantos." "The Desert Cantos"
started in 1979. Now I'm "Desert Canto
Number 40." The way all my
desert cantos start, I make one picture and it suggests the possibilities
of the others. And I just saw this
blue barrel and the blue flag
in the middle of nowhere. I just photographed it. I didn't even know
what it was. Wasn't until many years
later I learned that different humanitarian
groups would put water out for migrants coming
across the border. I decided to do a
whole series of them, and I would find
these in every state, you know, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. So this photograph was the first one that gave me the idea that's kind of
became the border cantos. So I spent the next five years traveling along the
U.S.-Mexico border from the coast where
the wall goes into the ocean all the way to
the Texas Gulf of Mexico. One of the things I've
learned from the series is that until you go see
this place yourself, you have no idea what's
really going on there. You look out
in the distance there, you can see
the end of the wall, so we're--it's gonna take a little while
to drive there, but we're on our way. The walls end.
It just stops abruptly. And there's not a Border
Patrol agent in sight. There's only 680 miles of actual wall along
the 2,000 mile border and they generally
put them in areas that are densely populated. And the idea is, is that, if they push people
out to the ends, it'd be so dangerous
for them to cross into wilderness area
that they would die. So they would--it would be so dangerous that
people wouldn't go. It would discourage people
from actually going across the border. That didn't work. In fact, many people--
more people have died since they built these walls
with these ends. [soft music] It's a beautiful
landscape here. Very pastorale, you know. It's just kind of remarkable how lovely and miracle
the landscape is and it's--it's weird
to have the--the wall just kinda breaking it up. Seems sinister. [disquieting music] When I first met Guillermo, he was performing an
instrument that he created-- that he had made out of
objects found on the border. I had just photographed the effigies along the
border and a light went off, I went, "Oh, my God, this could be a great
collaboration." [bang, string music playing] - It's interesting
because we have the-- the same aesthetic and the same way to approach
the border issues. If you see art of the border, sometimes it's about taking certain political
view about it. But our work is more
about opening spaces. It's about absence. [somber music] People is not there, you know, it's just the evidence
of what happens, what keep happening. - You take a minute,
stop and think about this crucifix that you
find--why is that there? What were they running from? All along the border,
you'd find human artifacts. It's devastating. Just--sometimes its fields
of them. I wanted them to be like
scenes of the crime, so I would photograph them often just with my cellphone. Straight on,
just like evidence. And then Guillermo
turned them into instruments. So I use different
photographic strategies to convey ideas. For the wall, often I'll
wait to the perfect light, and you know, I'll come back and photograph over
and over and over. I want to create
that monumentality of the anti-monuments. I want to make them
so beautiful that you have to look and
think about them. To really slow down
and consider and just think, this doesn't look right. Is--is it right? It's hard for art
to really solve problems, but I've come
to believe that art is a really important way of communicating not only with current generations,
but future generations. Some of my work, whether it's
a Telegraph Avenue, whether it's
"Petrochemical America," the photographs
of Cancer Alley and the Mississippi River
corridor, or the Bravo 20 bombing range, or the Oakland fire in 1991. Those things will remind you of something that we may
very well forget. All my photographs
are about America, and that's both the challenge
that it faces, the problems with it, but also its beauties, and I think it's all there. It's all there.
It's exquisite land. It's exquisite country. And the future of the country depends a lot on how we think
about places like this. What do you think? I wish we had
some food for you. Hi, sweetheart. Hi. Do you want to go home with me? Can I pet you? Maybe not, huh? Is this goodbye? Bye-bye. Hasta la vista, baby. [laughing]
