Field Book

Photographed across six years in Pima County, Arizona, Field Book traces the shifting social landscape of the Sonoran Desert and the lives shaped by an environment of extremes. This work is situated in a region an hour north of the contested United States-Mexico border, revealing a more entangled relationship with the southwestern landscape. Field Book foregoes the familiar political rhetoric of fear or photographic tropes of weathered miners to reveal a subtler frontier: one where quiet intimacies and ordinary struggles reflect back on our own lives.

As a teenager, Jordan Putt learned land surveying from his father, spending summer days weaving between prickly pear cacti with a GPS on a six-foot rod slung over his shoulder. What began as a tool for measuring topography became a way of understanding the social contours of the desert. In this work, the surveyor’s field book is reimagined as a photographic ledger, recording the physical geography and those bound by the enduring thread of the Sonoran Desert.

Field Book is currently available for preorder from Composit Press.