The American West has been in the grip of a relentless drought for more than twenty years – the most severe in over 1,200 years, according to palaeoclimatic reconstructions. This crisis is the result of natural variability and the continued overuse of water resources, particularly in the Colorado River basin. This vital artery supplies roughly forty million people and irrigates vast tracts of arid farmland. Lakes Mead and Powell, those immense man-made reservoirs born of the ambition to tame the desert, are emptying before our eyes. Their shorelines are retreating as if a tide were receding forever, leaving behind broad white rings of calcium carbonate that mark former water levels like scars on rock. In 2022, these reservoirs fell to their lowest levels on record. However, the true impact of the crisis is not merely reflected in the statistics or downward curves; it is evident in the fragmentation that the drought exposes and accelerates.

I have been particularly drawn to certain emblematic places in the American West that remain, even now, at the heart of major hydropolitical conflicts. The Colorado River, the Owens Valley in California and the Rio Grande in New Mexico embody a history of hydraulic conquest and the dead ends of the development model that produced it. These territories have been fragmented by decades of massive engineering works, such as dams, diversion canals and intensive pumping; over-allocated by legal agreements signed at a time when water was assumed to be inexhaustible; and gradually polluted or salinised by intensive agriculture and uncontrolled urbanisation. Through my photographs of these landscapes, I have sought to reveal the fatal combination afflicting them: a legacy of overexploitation that has drained aquifers and dried up entire rivers; amplified effects of climate variability; and inadequate governance, which is too often trapped by entrenched interests.

National parks were intended to preserve natural wonders for future generations, yet many have become underfunded and poorly managed destinations for mass tourism, while national forests frequently prioritise economic exploitation over ecology. The old debate between strict preservation and utilitarian conservation has never been resolved and keeps resurfacing.

The American West was built on the ideas of conquest, mastery and transforming desert into garden. This myth is slowly crumbling, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes more gradually. The desert is not reconquering the land; it is merely reminding us that it never truly surrendered. In this silent return, the cracks in an entire territory – physical, political and imaginary – are revealed. Travelling through New Mexico, Arizona and California, I have watched the desert reclaim landscapes once shaped by human ambition.