Stephen Strom has photographed the desert lands of the American Southwest for more than twenty years, and Earth Forms brings together, for the first time, a selection of his most powerful and memorable images. Strom, who has spent his professional career as an astronomer and has lived in the desert for almost two decades, brings those sensibilities to this landscape. His photographs capture a land shaped both by the millennial forces of prehistory and by yesterday’s cloudburst, compressing vast desert spaces into an illusion of intimacy and comprehension. Undulations of colour and form appear reimagined in a light that at once penetrates and sculpts.

The book is published by Dewi Lewis as a hardback of 96 pages, with 46 colour photographs and dimensions of 300mm by 300mm. Texts by Gregory McNamee and Albert Stewart accompany the images.

Strom began photographing in 1978, and his work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections. His photography complements poems and essays in three books published by the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, a collaboration with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo; Sonoita Plain: Views of a Southwestern Grassland, a collaboration with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock; and Tseyi (Deep in the Rock): Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, co-authored with Navajo poet Laura Tohe. Most recently, his work appeared in Otero Mesa: Saving America’s Wildest Grassland (University of New Mexico Press).

Earth Forms presents a sustained body of Southwestern landscape photography. Strom’s images reward repeated looking, in which apparently empty ground reveals structure and atmosphere, and the desert becomes a place of form and light.