In the Desert by Spaceheater Editions

Spaceheater Editions: “’In the Desert’ is another in a series of books that Zimmermann started in 2017 with the publication of 'Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene', followed by his 2023 book 'Melt'. The title of this book comes from a famous poem by Stephen Crane, written in 1895. It is a dark poem often described as being about greed, human nature, and self-destruction. It seemed the perfect metaphor for the way the human race is ignoring the way we are slowly destroying our fragile and life-sustaining Mother Earth.
“I visualized pictures of the Southwestern desert as an obvious choice to go along with the poem, and I recalled a series of photographs that I had taken in New Mexico in 2003 when I was on sabbatical. I located them and determined that they would work well with the poem. They were taken at Lake Lucero, a dry gypsum lake located in the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces. It is in a restricted part of the missile range and open to the public only a few times a year when National Park Service rangers take visitors holding US Passports on closed busses in to visit the dry lake. The dry gypsum crystals from the lake blow to the northeast and are the source of the famous white dunes in White Sands National Park. The park is located, as is the entire Missile Range, in the great Tularosa Basin.
“In the last 125 years, there has been much discussion about the meaning of Stephen Crane’s’ In the Desert’. It is a dream-like parable that can be taken many ways, but the creature is most often interpreted as a primal version of mankind, located in a barren lonely landscape. Most analyses see the bitter heart-eating as a reference to man’s tendency to be self-destructive. Since the conceptual metaphor for this book is that humans have been short-sighted and self-destructive with how we have taken care of our planet, I prefer that reading to the one that some ascribe to it: that Crane is calling out his belief that human nature is ‘inherently sinful and corrupt’.”