Under the Sun: A
Sonoran Desert Odyssey, by Adriel Heisey. Treasure Chest
Books, P.O. Box 5250, Tucson, AZ 85703 (520/623-9558). Hardcover:
$40. 114 pages.
Flying his ultralight airplane high above the Sonoran Desert,
Adriel Heisey found an appreciation for an alien landscape. A
former commercial pilot, Heisey moved to Tucson on a whim, and at
first the desert did nothing to inspire him. Setting off in his
homemade Kolb Twinstar, which looks like little more than a seat
with wings, changed that.
“I see nuance where I
once saw bleakness,” he writes in one of the essays that accompany
the photos in his book Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert
Odyssey. “I see fragility where I once saw harshness.”
But where Heisey’s prose often chases the
Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, landscape with heavy breaths, his
photos capture it effortlessly. The images often fix on patterns
discernable only from the air: Branching erosion along the Rio
Boquillas; the puzzle of saguaro cacti’s long evening shadows; the
curving crests of sand dunes in Gran Desierto.
Yet Heisey isn’t content with soothing natural images. Some of his
photos are challenging: A lone palo verde tree blooms in the middle
of a golf course under construction; orange-suited inmates stand in
a Tucson prison yard.
“Flying over the desert,
I see scenes that are pristine, but then I turn my head and see
something intrusive and appalling,” he says. Heisey admits,
however, that a beauty exists in the human-changed landscape of
dams, mines and superhighways. “Looking down on these things,” he
says, “I feel like I’m looking down on the mind of the human
species.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Pilot finds a soft spot for a hard land.
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