Watershed: A Speculative Atlas of California by Barron Bixler

Issue 176

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” – Joan Didion

Set against a backdrop of drought in the American West and the spiraling impacts of climate change, Watershed: A Speculative Atlas of California surveys the entire California water system in its natural and engineered forms. Exploring themes of control and powerlessness, precarity and resilience, damage and remediation, Watershed dwells on the hulking physicality of California’s water infrastructure and the way it’s come to rest so strangely and heavily on the land.

Over the years I've been working on the project, which I began in late 2014, I’ve had a front-row seat as California has reeled from one water-related catastrophe to another, including drought, wildfire, landslides, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination, toxic dust storms, municipal water shortages and flooding. But I never set out to document the state's water system specifically through the lens of acute disaster. In fact, for years I shot around its most obvious signifiers. As it endured through both meteorological and media cycles, I hoped Watershed would tell a deeper, more patient story about the historical origins and possible futures of California’s deepening water crisis.

And yet, as it turns out, the geography of disaster is inescapable.

In surveying these altered landscapes, Watershed offers an invitation to consider the complex systems that have been built, to mourn what’s been lost along the way and to pose a vital if unanswerable question: where does California go from here?

Barron Bixler (he/him) lives in Princeton, New Jersey, United States and works on projects primarily based in California, Colorado, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
www.barronbixler.com | @barronbixler