Trinity consists largely of musings and historical snippets about the shifting social- political climate of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts over the last four hundred years. The text by Charles Bowden explores a diverse range of subjects including the treatment of native peoples, mining booms and wars to its use as a nuclear testing site. All these topics potentially make for rich subject matter but the texts have a tendency to meander between personal anecdotes and myriad historical accounts without coming to clear conclusions. In one page alone Bowden flickers between an account of a bicycle ride he took in the desert as a youth, Edward Hopper in Paris in 1906, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Julius Caesar in Spain. This erratic writing style has a dizzying and tiring effect upon the reader.





Trinity is a text heavy book with only a quarter of it containing Berman’s black and white photographs, which are competent but innocuous and banal. A majority of the images are sterile panoramic landscapes of the desert that do not effectively engage with the geopolitical themes of the text. The images also maintain a distance and lack a criticality of the area. The occasional images that do zone in on details do not make for exciting viewing and usually consist of grass, sheep, fences, footprints and desert debris. For a book that largely discusses how people used or misused the area, there is little evidence of this in the photographs. The photographs within Trinity are dry, inert and left me feeling disconnected from its subject matter. —John Mathews