Field Book. Jordan Putt

Photographed over six years in Pima County, Arizona, Field Book traces the shifting social landscape of the Sonoran Desert and the lives shaped by this environment of extremes. Tucson, the county’s largest city, averages nearly 70 days a year above 38 degrees Celsius, with severe droughts and wildfires becoming increasingly frequent. Situated an hour north of the United States-Mexico border, political rhetoric of an “invasion” in the region often influences national conversations, adding an unsubstantiated “danger” to the very real danger already encoded in the climate. Field Book foregoes this reductive messaging for a more subtle frontier: one where quiet intimacies and ordinary struggles reflect on our own lives.

As a teenager, Jordan Putt learned land surveying from his father in the Sonoran Desert, spending summer days weaving between saguaro 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.