Downstream: Encounters with the Colorado River

Downstream is an arresting vision of the Colorado River by renowned landscape photographer Karen Halverson. The Colorado, crucial to development in the West, is at once wilderness, natural resource, recreation area, and wasteland.
In seventy large-format color photographs, Halverson captures the river's natural majesty as well as the strange and unexpected beauty of its altered state. The images take us on an intimate exploration of the Colorado's entire length—from its rugged upstream canyons, to its dams and reservoirs, to where it disappears into the desert, entirely consumed.
In an insightful, personal introduction to the photographs, Halverson tells how she explored the Colorado—accessing it by car, on foot, and by raft—while learning about its transformation into a complex water delivery system.
In a lyrical foreword, historian William Deverell sets the photographs in the illuminating context of Colorado River history and discovery.
In both images and prose, the book gives an extraordinary view of the Colorado's great and enduring splendor and a clear-eyed look at the many ironies contained in its waters.

"A striking assessment of the spectral Colorado River."—Philip L. Fradkin, author of A River No More: The Colorado River and the West and Wallace Stegner and the American West

"Karen Halverson's photographic sojourn down, beside and within the Colorado River is an eloquent form of visual mapping; a journey into the earth and into the spirit. Exploring the Colorado River's complex vein of life is something we should all do, hopefully learning along this path how deeply interdependent we all are."—Peter Goin, coauthor of Black Rock and Arid Waters: Photographs from the Water in the West Project

"Halverson examines the Colorado River neither as an idealized landscape nor as one under fire. More powerfully, perhaps, she defines the River—and by implication the West—as much more than wilderness, adventure, or adversity."—Annie Gilbert Coleman, author of Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies

Karen Halverson has spent a great part of her career documenting the American West, from the Colorado River to Southern California. Her photographs are in many public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has taught at the University of Southern California and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She lives in New York's Hudson River Valley with her husband, the actor Steven Gilborn.