55PH

Katherine Jenkins

Watermark

2015

Katherine Jenkins’s photographs — taken along the California Aqueduct, which carries Sierra Nevada snowmelt southward via a network of dams, reservoirs, channels, and pumping plants, beginning in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta and ending in Lake Perris — depict what you might call scenes from the frontlines of the water wars. The reservoir of Lake Oroville, at a quarter of its capacity; the San Luis Reservoir at nineteen percent. A desiccated cornfield in the Delta. A pipe that’s run dry in abandoned farmlands near Lost Hills, west of Bakersfield, and a pomegranate orchard sprouting from the parched earth, also in Lost Hills. Pipe arrays climbing treeless slopes. A dry canal. In all these scenes we see a system that’s at once powerful, built to get water “to where it is needed,” and tenuous, as it runs up against non-negotiable limits.

Watermark
Map of California showing average annual precipitation and key locations along the State Water Project
Watermark
Map of California showing major populations centers, existing and historic aqueducts, and irrigated land
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
Watermark
37°00'00.0"N 120°00'00.0"W

Location: California, USA

Text: John Bass


Posted: October 2015
Category: Photography

Source