How We Hold the Sun by Anna Rotty

Issue 183

I’m fascinated by rivers as fluid beings, rather than fixed representations, with complicated histories - bodies representing power and agency, but also subject to attempts to control them. Growing up on the Atlantic coast, and later living by Ocean Beach in San Francisco, I spent most of my life getting to know myself with large bodies of water. Now, living in the desert, we carry a lot of anxiety around water. It is scarce, often fleeting, and mistreated. I observe, and then reconstruct my photographic prints within the environment, investigating systems, both natural and built, that transfer energy and water from place to place. How We Hold the Sun consists of intimate portraits of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, often shown as layered moments within a single frame. I search for places where light and shadow come together in the depths or hover on surfaces to illuminate sediment, looking for connections between landscape and body. Now we witness the Rio Grande dry up annually. Seeing this, I spend time at the City’s Wastewater Treatment Plant, getting to know the cycles of water that contribute to the 3rd largest tributary of the river. I invite the river to become a part of her own photographic representation. Through layering time and creating sculptural bodies, I hope my images serve as an active experience of landscape, rather than reiterating a passive gaze, as the medium of photography has historically so often portrayed the non-human ecologies of the West.

Anna Rotty (she/her) lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
www.annarotty.com | @annarotty