Arizona Road Dust

Everyone, and everything, in Arizona has a story – even the dust.

Arizona Road Dust is series of 3 publications – Automatic Focus (2022), Oasis (2023), Desert Wild Life (2024) – collectively named after an ISO standard contaminant mined in Arizona and used for decades to test car parts and weather sealing. An aging engineer first told me about Arizona road dust while on a golf course in Rochester, two months before I moved to Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun.

I have come to see the pictures made over the next two years as guided by the idea of a place built, from the ground up, of stories. Arizona’s legends aren’t old enough to be myths, but they are present in every aspect of life. From the Superstition Mountains (named after rumors and whispers of disappearing treasure hunters) to the adventures of Wild West cowboys and outlaws, these stories allow thousands of Phoenix-area transplants, seasonal tourists (disaffectionately known as “snowbirds”) and locals alike to locate themselves in a grand narrative.

Even I needed a story – when asked what I was taking pictures of in Arizona, I would talk about road dust and the strangeness of how an industry found a way to extract and profit off of even the dust in an already ecologically exploited region.

But I’m not an environmental resource scientist, nor do I truly understand what goes into making desert sand into a standardized substance. I realized only later that I needed a story to situate and understand myself in Arizona, just like everyone else. The pictures tell a personal story of building an identity in Arizona, while also searching for the underlying stories with which others build their own identities. I don’t live in Arizona anymore but I visit often, and always there are new tales and tellings, floating in the breeze like a cloud of glittering dust.