photos and text by Heather Quinn, modeled by Quinn Bork

There’s a sad, haunted beauty to the desert east of San Diego unlike anywhere else. Cut off from moisture by steep mountains to the west, it seems isolated in time by its remoteness. Imagine the early settler crossing through vast and forbidding landscapes of wandering sand dunes, barren salt flats and burnt badlands just to see what lay beyond those mountains. It’s an easier journey now. The 8 freeway takes motorists through at high speed, air conditioners and radios blasting. But go off track a little ways on one of the many small roads stretching straight towards the horizon. Maybe, in the sound of the wind blowing through the ocotillo, you’ll hear an echo from an earlier time, when voyages like these were life or death.

That’s the kind of feeling I hoped to evoke through these portraits: the sense of isolation and danger that our desert used to represent to the brave men and women who blazed the original trails across it, and still does for immigrants who make the journey north from Mexico. The sense of place is strong, but time is ambiguous. The subject could be a pioneer 100 years ago making the crossing or he could be a ghost wandering the ruins of a boom town, for the desert is timeless and absolute.