A Still Afternoon at the Salton Sea

Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair, Albert Camus once said, because it offers us for a moment the glimpse of an eternity we would like to stretch out over the whole of time.

I was remembering this insight last week on a visit to the Salton Sea, a place where beauty and despair always seem to go hand-in-hand.

Once a shimmering oasis set against the Chocolate Mountains in southeastern California, the sea is becoming an environmental catastrophe. Restoration proposals abound, but lawmakers have mostly turned their backs on the sea.

As the lake continues to dry up — a result of geography, climate change, tough economic times, and ongoing water conflicts — time appears to be running out.

The four-minute exposure shown here was taken near Red Hill Marina on the south shore. It’s part of a personal project I’ve been working on for a number of years that documents the slow-motion environmental disaster playing out at the sea.

For more photos from the series, see Vanishing Oasis: The Decline of the Salton Sea.