In 1861, a young mining engineer named Raphael Pumpelly crossed the Camino del Diablo — the road of the devil — a 130-mile stretch of open desert between Arizona and Mexico that he found lawless, violent, and at the same time beautiful. His written account is the only historical document Mark Klett took as his starting point. Unable to retrace Pumpelly’s exact steps, Klett traveled the same corridor and made photographs that answer the engineer’s words without illustrating them, working instead toward what the publisher describes as a more poetic narrative of a shared experience of the desert across an interval of 152 years.
The distance between the two journeys is the book’s real subject. Where Pumpelly recorded Apache raids and repeated brushes with death, most of the Camino today lies inside the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, a militarized border zone patrolled by government agents and crossed by air and ground forces in training. Travelers hide from detection — immigrants or drug smugglers moving north under cover of night or the ruggedness of the terrain. Reservations mark further boundaries, and the heat still kills those who cross in summer. Klett’s photographs hold that present together with the nineteenth-century record, and with the severe beauty of the Sonoran Desert that both travelers recognized.
Klett is the photographer; Pumpelly supplies the historical text the pictures answer. Radius Books issues the work as a 172-page hardcover with 60 images. The structure follows the project’s double vision: an explorer’s dark, wide-eyed account set against a photographer’s critical distance, so the same ground reads as 1861 and as now. Because the images refuse to point at specific places or events, the sequence never settles into illustration; the desert becomes a medium for thinking about time, danger, and the recurring human traffic across this land.
That method is the reason the book rewards close attention. Klett’s wider practice has centered on a conversation with historical images, and here he limits himself to a single written witness, letting response rather than reconstruction govern the work. For a collector, the interest lies in this constraint and in what it produces: a body of photographs about contested terrain in which the past is neither reenacted nor abandoned but carried forward.
