I live in a desert and have seen plenty of it. There are different kinds of desert. There is the kind with soft rolling hills of orange sand, like ice cream or yogurt. Not much grows in these deserts. Then there are the rough and crumbly deserts, hills of cracked rock, valleys of soft-edged stone worn by years of occasional rain. Stuff grows here, like acacia trees and thorny bushes.
In the Sonora desert of the western United States, you get all kind of odd shaped cacti, of which Lee Friedlander took many photos in the 1990s. He’s known more for what might be called his street photography, but late in life he got into landscape and spent some time exploring the desert.
