Karen Halverson has been photographing the western desert landscape for twenty-five years. She is struck by the extraordinary breadth of the desert landscape and the visibility it affords. She is drawn to situations in which the human presence is felt on the land. For Halverson, the car is an obvious symbol of our presence. In her desert photographs, Halverson favors the waning light of evening. As the light fades, land features disappear from view, while artificial lights, often from cars, cast bold color across the darkening landscape.

Halverson’s work has been collected and exhibited by many prominent museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Huntington Library and Art Museum, and the Library of Congress.

Halverson’s photographic monograph, Downstream: Encounters with the Colorado River, will be published by the University of California Press in 2008. Downstream chronicles Halverson’s two-year exploration of the river’s 1700 mile length.

See a complete resume and a wide selection of Halverson’s work at www.karenhalverson.com.

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