Laurence Cornet : John Trotter, you won the Photo Documentary Project Award at the Kolga Tbilisi festival for your 13 years long ongoing reportage about the Colorado River, No Agua No Vida. How did you get interested in the West?
John Trotter : I covered death in Somalia in 1992, when it was probably the worst place in the world. It was pretty short, maybe two weeks, but it made almost everything else I photographed feel less important. The first thing I did after I came back was to take a year off of work and ride my bike across the United States. There were a couple of signs on U.S. Highway 50 through Nevada saying “The loneliest road in America”. I remember at one point, there were two towns about 110 miles apart, with only one Peruvian shepherd with a trailer in the middle, and nothing else, really nothing. I thought: “What an amazing place, it’s so empty of people here!” I got fascinated with the open space and the way people live out there. It’s all engineered. Everybody is living around elaborate water projects that make living there even possible and no one acknowledges it. That sense of denial has always interested me, especially in the United States.
LC : Nevada encompassed the ambiguity of both the American West and the American Way.
JT : It is the rough American West, much more conservative than California even though it is so close. You cross the Nevada mountains and its suddenly a very different looking world. There are almost no natural borders to this state – the Colorado river maybe, but the rest are just surveyor lines. And within those lines – whoever made them -, there are all different laws. Gambling is legal, prostitution is legal, the politic is so different. Everything is so different. There is a huge extraction industry, and gold mining. At that time, they used ammonium nitrate to mine gold, the very cheap and very explosive fertilizer that Tim McVeigh used to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Courthouse in 1995!
I have been rescued one day by a family of cow boys: a storm caught up with me while I was climbing a pass really slowly and the next habitation was about 65 kilometers away. I saw a cheap little trailer at the bottom of the path, so I went and knocked on the door. A man comes, he has a cowboy hat on, a sheep wool coat on. I am so cold I am shaking: “Cacacacaaan I just sststay here until it sststoops?” And the man said: “Well.” – I remember how slowly he talked: “We have been down at the neighbors branding cows all morning so we don’t have a fire started in the house, but there is a heater on at the barn if you want to go down there!” He brought me some coffee and they fed me their raised beef. And there I was: I hadn’t eaten meat at that point maybe in 14 years but what could I say ? “Excuse me, I am a vegetarian from California, do you have anything else ?”
LC : You moved to New York in 2000 and your fascination for the West didn’t vanish. You started this long project on the Colorado river that has had enough contrasts to fulfill your visual appetite for paradoxes for 13 years. You have collected photographs of Indian ceremonies, grassy gulf fields, broken pipes spreading pounds on empty roads, fishermen looking for birds. What have been driving you all these years?
JT : I read a book that made a very strong impression on me so I decided to investigate. I started at the very end of the river, on the Mexican side, and I have been photographing from that perspective the whole time! Whenever I am photographing along the river, I am always thinking of who is at the end of the river, and what relation people who are using the water 400 kilometers aways from the river have to these people. Not only to the people, but to the whole environment that has been completely altered. For decades the Colorado River Delta in Mexico had been starved of water by dams far upstream in the American Southwest. No one knows where the river is. It is filled with tamarix now, an invasive plant from Asia that completely took over.
LC : On March 23, 2014, you were present when they open the gates of the Morelos Dam – the only dam on the Colorado river in Mexico, right at the border with the United States – as part of an agreement that allows Mexico to store water in the American reservoirs in exchange of taking less water during drought seasons.
JT : Do you see that picture of the man at the river ? That was the end of the Colorado River until this crazy event. You must have seen when they opened the gates of the dam: suddenly, the pool that was already there started boiling up, and you could see the water coming in. It filled a first channel, then another, and soon it was a river. The day after, I went up on a canoe with some local environmentalists looking for birds. I had gone with them for over 10 years, but this time we were on a river! It was the first time since a few cases of flood in the early 1990’s when the water went all the way to the ocean. Finally. People came out to look at the water and celebrate. I got an excited text message from a scientist of Pronatura – a mexican environmental group who I was working with in San Luis, further South on the river. “It’s fantastic. The water is almost at the bridge.” By there you would see the water approaching very slowly, like when you drop something on your kitchen floor before you mop it up. It took the whole afternoon for the water to go 500 meters but there it was, in San Luis Río Colorado. There were children who had never even seen the river though it was half the name of their town.
LC : The water ran up really fast and the continuum has already gone. For one month, these people were joined to the river again. One month: it was like a mirage. In a way, your photographs seem to fill more permanently the missing river than such an ephemeral release by going back and forth between very different points and people connected to the river.
JT : Rivers are linear, they are like the blood in your veins. Here in New York we are connected to the people up in Poughkeepsie because the Hudson is a long thing that is alive in a way. The environmentalists want the water release to happen regularly. Of course it is good, but in the same time the landscape has been changed by the dam. The United States didn’t even think about Mexico when they built the dams on the Colorado River. They took it. These are political boundaries. I am reading a very interesting book about the Indian tribe of Cocopahs – “Cucapá”, in Mexico means “the people of the river”. The writer, Shaylih Muehlmann, makes her point very well with a simple example: when you are a kid and wash your hands, your mother tells you to turn off the tub not to waste water. In the case of the Colorado River, wasting water is to allow any of it to reach the ocean. Unless you are taking all of it, you are wasting it. This is the same word but a totally different concept!
Framing the paradoxes to get the full picture.
