In California’s Owens Valley, water rarely follows a straightforward path. Snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada sinks into desert ground, resurfaces ages later in hot springs, gathers into a river, and then vanishes into pipes that sustain a city more than two hundred miles away. The Course of Water – Fieldnotes from California’s Owens Valley takes this peculiar hydrology as both subject and method, tracing how the movement and capture of water have shaped the lives of Indigenous, settler, and internee communities. Todd Stewart’s photographs attend closely to the region’s human-made landscape, where aqueducts, channels, and dry lakebeds form a knot of connections that is as disorienting as it is engineered. These images are paired with select archival material, producing a visual map that is layered rather than illustrative. Robert Bailey’s accompanying texts and notes deepen the historical record, examining how the diversion of the Owens River after 1913 led to the desiccation of Owens Lake and how later remediation efforts, however well funded, continue to reflect colonial patterns. The book does not present water as a simple victim of greed; it follows its loops and detours, from Mount Whitney to a wetland kept artificially alive.
What distinguishes this volume is its insistence on holding natural and human flows together. Stewart’s photographs do not merely document infrastructure—they register the contested meanings that water carries in the valley. A starkly photographed Eastern Mono water basket, orchards planted by Japanese Americans during their wartime internment, the nearby Alabama Hills where movie stars once shot westerns: these are not digressions but evidence of how a single watershed becomes a stage for larger forces. The design by Rob van Hoesel gives the sequence room to breathe, allowing archival images and contemporary photographs to enter into quiet dialogue. Bailey’s writing is similarly measured, drawing out the persistence of colonial logic in current remediation while also attending to acts of Indigenous gardening that resist in an increasingly arid climate.
For collectors, the book’s value lies in this collaborative intelligence. It is not a monograph of spectacular landscape photography, nor a policy brief, but a sustained inquiry into how a place is made and unmade by the movement of water. The Eriskay Connection has a record of producing books that treat design and content as inseparable, and this Otastar softcover is no exception: its 176 pages feel carefully paced, with the dimensions of 200 × 280 mm giving the images enough scale to reveal detail without losing the intimacy of a field notebook. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies, but the real argument for acquisition is the book’s capacity to reward repeated looking and reading. It asks the reader to navigate currents that intersect like the natural and artificial channels of the Owens Valley, and in doing so, it offers a model for how photography and text can together address environmental history without simplification.
