There was a certain logic to us all working together, we all had a shared interest and fascination with military technology and land use… The development of stealth technology which had taken place in the deserts of America was just becoming known after the Gulf War… There was an emerging aura of mystery and secrecy around military land use and an atomic legacy…
The investigations of military land use moved beyond the American desert as Walter and Steven began collaborating with British artist Michael Sanders, whom they met after showing Desert Work at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1991. As Sanders recalls, “There was a certain logic to us all working together, we all had a shared interest and fascination with military technology and land use… The development of stealth technology which had taken place in the deserts of America was just becoming known after the Gulf War….There was an emerging aura of mystery and secrecy around military land use and an atomic legacy which Cotten and De Pinto had alluded to in their previous Desert Work projects….From conversations with Walt and Steve I am sure the title Desert Work was very deliberately chosen to make it clear that this was work both in and about the desert.”
This collaboration resulted in work centered on the abandoned military bunkers and bombing ranges of England and northern France. “I believe we tried to treat the places we visited with the same approach and sensibility Walter would use in his desert work. Whilst on nothing like the same scale, the bleakness and relative emptiness of the east of England let us play with the similarities overlaid with common land use issues.” Abandon in Place, subtitled by Walter as A Desert Work/Europe Project, was shown at the Cambridge Darkroom in 1995. Later collaborations between Cotten and Sanders included photographing at the Trinity Site in New Mexico and the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant), the underground nuclear storage site also in New Mexico.
ARID Journal
http://aridjournal.com/walter_cotten/
