The Devil’s Highway

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With this haunting new collection of photographs, Joan Myers continues the decades-long journey she began in Where the Buffalo Roamed (with Lucy Lippard), documenting the changing landscape and culture of the American West. The images in this new collection are more personal, more elegiac––and all black-and-white. They bear witness to the slow fracturing of the American Dream, the demise of cowboy culture, and the shrinking of small towns, ranches, and farms throughout western rural America. The themes she examines are reflected in Devil’s Highway, a powerfully evocative short story by Pulitzer finalist William deBuys, first published in 1992 in Story magazine and reproduced again here for the first time. It is as evocative of the social and visual landscapes of the rural West now as when it originally appeared—perhaps more so, touching as it does on the harsh realities of the lives of undocumented workers and other denizens of the border struggling to survive.

Myer and deBuys previously collaborated on Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, which inspired the highly acclaimed film, The Colorado. Joan Myers has spent much of her time roaming the American West, but has also worked in India, the Canary Islands, Antarctica, Java, Sicily, Sardinia, Hawaii, and more. Her extensive photo archive is now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History on the University of Texas campus.