THIRST.

Great Salt Lake. Photographs by Fazal Sheikh. Text by Terry Tempest Williams and Fazal Sheikh.

Fazal Sheikh, 2024. 134 pp., 69 color photographs, 11x14¾".

THIRST: Great Salt Lake is the first in a series of publications by Fazal Sheikh which register the toll taken by industrial exploitation and the changing climate on the land and the people of the American southwest. In a cumulative sequence of images, Sheikh presents a visceral portrait of the damage caused to the Great Salt Lake and its surrounding areas by intensive extraction of its natural resources for industrial use, in particular the processing of magnesium, and the resulting pollution of its waters by chemical waste.

The Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake supplied by two rivers which in turn are dependent on the levels of snowmelt in the nearby mountain ranges. Over successive decades the water from these rivers has been syphoned off for agricultural use, for irrigation, for industrial and urban conurbations, so that their water levels are increasingly depleted before they ever reach the lake.

In the Fall of 2023, the combination of these adverse factors, including increasingly hot summers resulting in long periods of drought, brought Great Salt Lake to its lowest ebb. The salinity of the water threatened the survival of brine shrimp on which hundreds of thousands of migrating birds depend each year. As the lake has receded, a rim of toxic deposits has been exposed which, dried by the sun and carried by the wind, form clouds that threaten the health of nearby communities such as Salt Lake City, with a population of over 200,000.

In November 2023, after recording the surface area of the lake in a series of aerial photographs, Sheikh accompanied the writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams, who grew up near the lake and has remained close to it throughout her life, in a series of walks which enabled them to see evidence of the damage at close quarters. The results are documented in Williams’s essay, “Retreat”, published together with Sheikh’s volume of images, and together they form a damning record of careless exploitation and irrevocable damage that has brought the Great Salt Lake to the brink of extinction.

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