The flooded wasteland of Death Valley produces an almost abstract image

The Image Makers section examines how a photo influences our view of reality. This week: Death Valley, normally the driest place in the US, is full of water.

On August 20, 2023, as much water fell in one day in the southwestern United States (and in northwestern Mexico) as normally falls in a year. One of the side effects of Hurricane Hilary was the flooding of the lowest part of the US, the so-called Badwater Basin in Death Valley, which is 86 meters below sea level.

Only a few people could see this natural wonder, as many of the roads in the nature reserve were also washed away. There was fear that the roads would not be passable again until the water in one of the driest places in the US had already evaporated. But in early February, a lot of water fell in the area again, this time due to an ‘atmospheric river’ (long, meandering showers that can contain enormous amounts of water at high altitudes). Unique weather is becoming less and less unique. The main roads were passable and last weekend many people (some with kayaks or paddleboards on the roof) drove into the park to see the water wonder.

One of them was AFP photographer David Swanson, who shot a series of visitors to Lake Manly (named after the lake that was here in prehistoric times), which surfaced in the media worldwide last week. In a week with a lot of miserable news and images, Swanson’s photos were the highlight of the selection. On Wednesday this newspaper also published a photo from the series, which made people curious about his entire report.

It’s clear he spent hours there. We see people strolling barefoot, as if it were the first day of spring on the North Sea beach. He takes a number of close shots of the day trippers, but as the day progresses and the light very slowly disappears, he increasingly distances himself. The visitors are reduced to a kind of musical notes in an immense landscape with blue and brown basic tones. A landscape where it can be more than 50 degrees Celsius in summer.

The last photo in the series is almost abstract. Photo agency Getty distributed the image with the caption: “Tourists take advantage of the rare opportunity to see water in Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, normally the driest place in the United States.” Would the photographer be able to hear their voices at this distance or would everyone move silently along the shores of this new lake? Are we here at the lowest, the driest, the hottest and now the quietest place?

Swanson has seen an incredible amount of misery as a photographer in recent decades, from natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina to the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010. He was also at the front during civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tbilisi in Georgia. He visited Afghanistan several times as an embedded photographer for the US Army. And in 2004, he was wounded while following a group of Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom; this Echo Company suffered the heaviest American losses since the Vietnam War. He made an impressive short documentary about the men he worked with at the time; containing award-winning photographs of young men who did not survive. In Echoes of War (on YouTube) he says: ‘I’m sure I missed thousands of photos in Ramadi, Iraq. But I was also able to make a few.’

You could also say that the photos Swanson took this past weekend document the urgency of climate catastrophe. Two exceptional, ‘once in a century’ weather events within six months lead to a flooded desert. Some people then sit in a kayak. But of course you could also let that majestic landscape come towards you and slowly disappear into it, as Swanson seems to do in the photo above.

The National Park website states that so much water has now flowed into Lake Manly that the lake may make it to spring. And then Death Valley might just blossom. There’s a good chance that David Swanson will be there again.