Four hundred years before I began photographing Paso del Norte’s historic smelting landscape, conquistadors traversing it on horseback waded north across the Rio Grande where it cuts a gash through the Rocky Mountains. The lure was silver, gold, and pagan souls–all promising generous returns for the trouble. By the mid-nineteenth century, el Camino Real, joining Mexico City to Santa Fe through today’s El Paso, was well-worn. Its rutted parched landscape was infamous, first trod by Indigenous hunters and traders, then by Spanish soldiers, Catholic missionaries, and migrants. And after them, mining engineers, railroad surveyors, and captains of industry–hoping to claim the treasure the conquistadores had missed. 

            By the late 1800s, eastern speculators had reshaped the continent’s mountain spine from Alaska to southern Mexico, much of it along the historic Camino route. Wilderness morphed into industrial landscape, a network of mines and smelters linked by a grid of new railroads to deepwater ports and world markets. Controlling most of it, by either influence or outright ownership, were a half dozen Gilded Age icons–Clark, Hearst, Heinze, Huntington, Rockefeller, and Meyer Guggenheim, founder of M. Guggenheim Sons, and its American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO). That rowdy era was as much clad in copper as gilt in gold. Copper, its mining, smelting, refining, was at the heart of enormous new fortunes–primary among them, Guggenheim’s. The family name, after more than a century, remains a synonym for philanthropy, arts patronage and implausible wealth.

            Learning that Guggenheim money had come, literally, from dirt and rock was news to me. In 2010, researching the El Paso ASARCO smelter, and photographing the first phases of its demolition, I wished I could channel the voices of its earliest workers, now long gone. I wanted to know these trabajadores, the smelter laborersand their compatriots, those who had worked the mines under Santa Eulalia in Mexico, and deep beneath Leadville in Colorado.

            Artifacts, and the departed, don’t easily give up their stories. The best I can do is to photograph remnants of their ephemeral landscape: El Paso’s smelter site and workers’ cemetery, California Gulch in the Colorado Rockies, Santo Domingo in the desert canyon above Ciudad Chihuahua. The story, the vista, spans fifteen hundred miles. But nowhere to be seen, not even as mirages over the horizon, are Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian palace, or el Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, or the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in Manhattan:

Almost involuntarily, I see myself magically lifting and transporting it, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 5th Avenue spiral gem, two thousand miles south to carefully perch it on a tailings dump in Santa Eulalia. Then I invite the town’s mineros in to wander–to marvel at what they and their ancestors have built.

            The question “To whom do we owe our wealth, and do we pay for it what we wholly owe?” drives this project. The photos here are mementos. Collectively they pay homage to a four century narrative, to the people who lived, worked and died here–and to the living landscape they leave behind.

–Martin Stupich, Albuquerque 2024

            Some of the world’s most compelling places are those altered by industry, war, time and the calamity that we bring by simply living here. The photographs from UnEarth honor the complexity of this conundrum.

           Landscape is everywhere. When we think of it as the subject of art, we conjure sylvan vistas (Claude Monet, Ansel Adams). But when we say industrial landscape, the words grate, fit together uncomfortably; we see rusting architectural hulks littering vast toxic wastelands.

            In my lifetime the world has (naturally) changed. So my way of seeing it has evolved. Extractive industry, oil rigs, fracking and open pit mines–to photographers these are now as cogent as an iconic New Mexico moonrise or the ephemeral vail of a cascading waterfall. Beauty in nature resides everywhere, and human nature shapes much of what we relish in the world.

            We trust photography to render faithful portraits of our families, friends, ourselves. Though the people in my pictures (when they appear at all) are as tiny as bugs, I see my work as portraiture too, as cultural autobiography. The cities we build, the rivers we dam, the mountains we level tell clearly what we care about. What we do matters hugely, and our legacy of monumental artifacts describes us perfectly.

            In the landscape, we all know the elation, the momentary disorientation when we turn a corner near the rim of a mile-deep canyon, and are snagged by the implausible vista unfurling just past our shoes. This chasm before us may have been cut over eons by the Colorado River, or in a few decades by blasting crews and haul trucks mining copper ore. Either way, at that instant the scale and atmosphere grab us and raw beauty pulls us in. Hooked, we begin to think about what we behold. Whether that is splendor or plunder, we are in momentary awe.

            UnEarth savors this paradox: we turn the earth inside out pursuing treasure; in that ravenous frenzy, we are shown beauty we neither expect nor deserve. 

Martin Stupich

June, 2017

One version, one history, of the present has the world split into “developed” and “developing”. The lucky ones are in the first group; most people make up the second. The now-common shorthand “third world” was coined in 1952 by French economist Alfred Sauvy to distinguish the poor, hungry, dark majority from the rest of us–those who thrive by leveraging power to control territory and resources.

            Humanity’s most important inventions, though invisible, are language and science. But the most compelling artifacts are things, physical evidence of how people live. Cave paintings, pyramids, luxury liners on the sea floor–these all help to fill in the blanks as we try to decipher the long story of us.  In gathering clues, nothing beats the tangible. The best essay about arrowheads pales compared to holding a perfect Clovis point. Looking up nine stories from the bottom of an abandoned nuclear missile silo is more chilling than reading about doing it.

            Machines and buildings, tools and landscapes, these are the characters of a glyph which narrates our collective autobiography. These remnants of the first world are the evidence we leave as we plow ahead. For the most part, they are wondrous and plain, in the same way that a collection of common utensils can be.

            Many of the things in these pictures are now gone; some of them are new and will stand for centuries. But they all occupy the same thin layer; eventually they, and we, will share a single leaf of history, a few-millimeter-thick stratum of dust pressed between shiny basalt and peaty bog.

            But for now, naïve optimism allows us pride in our accomplishments. The world we build is perfectly natural, or at least as natural as our natures can conjure. And naturally, everything around us changes; and so do we, almost effortlessly. We shed superstition for reason, love letters for emojis, Hummers for hybrids. What we leave behind is a debris field, a puzzle for sure–but an archeologist’s dream.

            These photographs, like the billions made every day, examine moments and places as though they were special, worth remembering. They are like postcards to the future. And scrawled in pencil on the back of any one might be: “I wish you could have been here to see this!  - Your friend, M.”.