Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) is a nature film made with a stream, rather than about it. Its images come from a combination of cyanotype, a blue-and-white photographic process dating back to the 1840s, and actual plant material adhered to physical film. I hand-coated clear 16mm leader with cyanotype chemicals, then used sunlight to make photogram-style, cameraless exposures of plant matter I had gathered in and around the stream in Eaton Canyon. Cyanotypes are processed using water, and for this film, I used stream water that I had also collected from the canyon. I approached the film as though the stream, what was in it, its surroundings, the film, the chemicals, and I were all extensions of one another.

Water is on our minds a lot these days in California and has been for a long time. It is central to histories of Eaton Canyon and the broader USAmerican West. Those histories are also intertwined with settler colonialism, extraction, genocide, and also with nature image making. The imaging/imagining of nature—in paintings, in poems, in Sierra Club calendars, in nature films—as a pristine, untouched space separate from people, as a destination for visiting and for escape, relies on the erasure and denial of the ongoing violence on which the idea of the USAmerican West was built and is continually rebuilt. Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) is part of a larger ongoing project to pursue images that question these inherited traditions of nature imaging and propose other possibilities.