Published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018, Craig Varjabedian’s Into the Great White Sands is a sustained photographic study of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument. Its subject is an environment at once monumental and finely articulated: snow-white gypsum dunes, broad horizons, wind-shaped surfaces, desert vegetation, animal tracks, gathering storms, and the people drawn to this singular landscape.

Varjabedian works in color, attending closely to the changes that weather and light impose on the terrain. Panoramic views establish the scale and openness of the dune field, while more intimate photographs isolate ripples, tracks, plants, and other fragile details. The movement between distance and proximity prevents White Sands from becoming a single emblematic view. Instead, the place appears as a mutable system in which stillness and disturbance, geological form and living presence, continually meet.

The photographs are accompanied by essays by poet and author Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, former monument superintendent Dennis Ditmanson, former missile-range public affairs officer Jim Eckles, and Varjabedian himself. These perspectives widen the book beyond landscape appreciation, placing the images in relation to natural history, local knowledge, human use, and the practical experience of photographing the dunes. The collaboration is especially apt for a site whose meanings are ecological, cultural, and historical as well as visual.

Across 136 pages, this hardcover brings together the expansive and the minute without reducing the desert to spectacle. For collectors of landscape photography and books concerned with the American Southwest, its significance lies in that breadth: a concentrated body of color work joined to writing by contributors with distinct relationships to White Sands. The result is both a photographic interpretation of place and a considered regional document.