Jaclyn Wright’s High Visibility (Blaze Orange), published by GOST Books in 2023, is set in Utah’s West Desert, on the western side of the Great Salt Lake. The land is the ancestral home of the Goshute people, and most of it falls under the management of the Bureau of Land Management. Classified by the federal government as “public lands,” it is nonetheless leased to mining and cattle operations, and nearly a third of it serves as biological and chemical weapons testing grounds. The lake itself is shrinking under overuse and human-caused ecological change, endangering migratory birds and the residents of Salt Lake City.
Wright’s project combines original images, performance, archival photographs and maps to show the impact of late capitalism and settler colonisation on the landscapes of the Western United States. The book traces a contest between the natural world and its codification by bureaucrats: the visible and the invisible, the freedoms promised on stolen land and the nativism that accompanies them. The phrase “West Desert” names a territory intimately known and legally abstracted at once.
That tension is carried by colour. Blaze orange recurs through the book, drawn from the most conspicuous debris left in the desert ranges: clay pigeons painted for visibility against sky and scrub, a colour engineered to oppose the landscape rather than blend into it. Its presence as an organising motif gives the sequence a visual spine on which photographic, archival and performative elements meet.
The book is 192 pages and hardback. Wright is the photographer, and R. H. Lossin is listed as a contributor. The project examines land as a site of political and ecological contestation through photography and related visual material.
