Former GCC Artist in Residence on the Importance of Public Lands

On a warm September evening, I walked along the Rim Trail as the sun sank beneath the walls of Grand Canyon. Dusty purples and blues smeared the sky like watercolor, and the Kolb brothers, Ellsworth and Emery, were on my mind. Their historic photography studio, still perched at the edge of the South Rim, was the focus of my residency. Just as the last of the daylight began to fade, I paused suddenly, my gaze fixed on a rock just off the trail. It was cleft in two, with a dizzying glimpse of the lower canyon visible through the crevice that separated its parts. With the excitement of recognizing an old friend in public, I realized that I was looking at the site of one of the Kolb’s most famous photographs. If you’ve spent time in Grand Canyon, you’ve likely seen it too: a black and white image of Ellsworth Kolb dangling precariously between a crevice, while Emery suspends him from a rope above.

As a writer and visual artist with a background in the history of photography, I’ve spent much of my career believing that the conservation of images and written artifacts is the most important part of preserving history. During my time in residence, I made weekly trips to Flagstaff where I became a regular at Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library Special Collections, the archive that houses the Kolb brothers’ legacy. I also worked closely with Grand Canyon Museum Collections, and the act of archival research quickly became a critical element of my practice at the canyon. The broader notion of the archive—the physical objects we choose to preserve the past—is something that has always been at the center of my work. But standing there beside that crevice in the rock, knowing the subjects of my project had stood there too, I felt a connection to the past that could never be replicated by looking through documents.

In that moment, the crucial importance of the land itself as an archive began to sink in for me. More than photographs, more than journals, pages, or prints, it is the land that holds our collective memory and our connection to what came before. 

But preservation is more than just appreciation. If the land is an archive, it requires an archivist—and equally, it requires financial investment and infrastructure. I was in residence at the canyon in August 2024, when the park shut down due to severe water restrictions resulting from a series of breaks in the Transcanyon Waterline. I had visited Grand Canyon many times before, but I’d never seen it like this: a ghost town. After nightfall, with no hotels operating, the village took on a strange, otherworldly stillness. It became easier to imagine the way the landscape must have looked in the Kolb brothers’ very early days at the canyon before it was established as a National Park. At night during the period of the shutdown, I wandered the village like a time traveler and gave myself over to the eerie, beautiful silence. But beneath the novelty of one of the most visited places in America suddenly being almost empty, there was a sobering reality. Without the necessary infrastructure, this remarkable place could no longer support a human presence. The reflection, reverence, and research that millions come here seeking was rendered inaccessible.

Funding crises like the one currently threatening our national parks are about more than red tape and bureaucracy. They are an existential threat not only to the environment, but to our broader cultural and historical memory. Without adequate financial support, we risk losing access to these sacred places and the stories embedded within them. As Artist-in-Residence, I came to the park with a narrow focus: to explore the legacy of the Kolb brothers and the images they made. But although I did achieve that goal, I ultimately left the canyon thinking less about photographs and more about the stories that can’t be captured: the ones held in the silence of the canyon walls, in the dark between stars, and in the footprints left by visitors.

Public lands are not passive paper backdrops. They are places of inquiry. Places of memory. A living record of who we are and who we have been. And in order for future generations to have that same access to history—to feel what I felt standing on the trail at sunset—we must advocate fiercely for the protection and funding of the land. 

The archive is alive and evolving. Let’s do our duty as archivists and keep it that way.