All photos © Sant Khalsa

Pray for Rain (Prayer Wheel), 2015

Sant Khalsa

Sant Khalsa (b. 1953, New York, New York) is an artist and activist who has lived in Southern California since 1975. Her mindful inquiry into the nature of place is at the root of her life and visual work.

Her photographs, sculptures and installations have been exhibited internationally; her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Nevada Museum of Art, National Galleries of Scotland, and UCR/California Museum of Photography, and others, in addition to private collections throughout the United States and Europe.

Over her esteemed career Khalsa has received fellowships, awards and grants from many significant institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, California Humanities, California Arts Council and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She was awarded the 2023-24 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (Legacy Tier) and in March 2012, she was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award for her significant contributions to the field.

Also, Khalsa co-authored the book Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees in conjunction with curating the Getty supported PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition of the same title, currently on view at the Lancaster Museum of Art & History.

Khalsa is Professor of Art, Emerita at California State University, where she served on the art faculty from 1988 to 2018; she is one of the founding faculty of the CSUSB Water Resources Institute research center and archive. She hosts the ecoartspace.org monthly program Tree Talk: Artists Speak for Trees and is the founding director of the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts. Her first book, Prana—Life With Trees (Griffith Moon), was published in 2019.

Before Flint, before ever-expansive wildfires annually ravaged her home state of California and much of the west coast, yet after the popular introduction of bottled water to the American consciousness in the 1990s, Sant Khalsa discovered a store called Water Shed, and photographed it.

That was the first of what would become her series Western Waters. The sixty gelatin-silver photographs, made between 2000 and 2002, depict water stores in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and southern Nevada. At that time, Khalsa said: “the photographs will serve in the future as a historical document of either a fleeting fad, or the foundation of what will become commonplace in our society.”

Twenty years have passed since Khalsa completed this photographic project. Bottled water is an over $11 billion dollar industry, yet millions of Americans are daily affected by the lack of access to clean drinking water. The existence of these stores in the early part of the millennium played on human fears and desires—never-ending thirsts—that have become need in a very short period of time.

Khalsa’s framing of these small businesses is an homage to Walker Evans, the seminal influences of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the typologies of fellow Californian Ed Ruscha—whose words preface the series in the book—while demonstrating a sensitivity to a prescient subject matter that is unique.

Crystal Clear || Western Waters by Sant Khalsa
Minor Matters, 2023
Hardcover with jacket, 72 pages, 60 photographs
ISBN 978-1-73564-236-9

Carleton E. Watkins, Yucca Draconis, Mojave Desert, 1880

Exhibition Dates: September 7 - December 29, 2024
Location: Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH), Lancaster, CA

Curated by Sant Khalsa, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) presented Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees as part of the Getty PST ART initiative, Art & Science Collide, in partnership with the Getty and over 70+ other organizations.

The exhibition sheds light on the threatened Joshua tree and the fragile Mojave Desert ecosystem that sustains it. The project integrates natural history, indigenous knowledge, public policy, scientific research, and artistic expressions to emphasize the challenges facing the Joshua tree and conservation efforts. With a focus on the impact of climate change, development, wildfires, and other threats, the exhibition explores the symbiotic relationships between Joshua trees, soil fungi, and moth pollinators, engaging a diverse audience interested in arts and environmental issues. Desert Forest features more than 50 historical and contemporary artists.

All photos © Debbie Bentley

Debbie Bentley is a photographer from Denver, Colorado. Her work focuses on documenting places and environments, exploring their connection to the internal experiences of people and the importance of recording this interconnectedness.

Her documentation of the Salton Sea in Imperial County, California, was the subject of the 2020 Daylight Books monograph Salton Sea: Beautiful Desolation, with a foreword by Mark Murrmann, photo editor at Mother Jones. The project, and subsequent book, captured the Salton Sea and dust remediation efforts in 2018, the first year after state and federally mandated water transfers to the Sea were halted. Images from this body of work were featured in Bloomberg Businessweek. Her project Dammed: Birth To Death Of The Colorado River, has been published by Daylight Books in January 2024.

Bentley is currently working on a number of projects, including Bentlandia. Bentlandia began as a side project while photographing for both the Salton Sea and Dammed projects. The images focus on the absurd - the unique places and things found across the west and southwest US. Some are ironic, others flat out funny. They reflect the individualism of the region.

Bentley is a Board of Directors Emeritus member of PhotoAlliance.

Dammed: Birth To Death Of The Colorado River follows the roughly 1,450-mile main stem of the Colorado River, from birth in the Rocky Mountain National Park to its end at the border of Mexico, and the 16 dams and diversions along its course. The multi-year photographic project documents the river, dams, reservoirs, and people interacting with the river along this route. The intent of this environmental photography project is to bring attention to the increasingly arid condition of the Colorado River basin, and prompt discussion and learning about not only the Colorado River watershed, but of water supply in general.

Dammed: Birth To Death Of The Colorado River by Debbie Bentley
Daylight Books, 2024
Hardcover, 192 pages; 80 photographs
ISBN 978-1-95411-931-4

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