Elliot Ross: A Question of Balance

The American photographer has travelled widely around the world, but feels most at home in the southern part of the state of Utah, USA. Over the years, he has built up a network of contacts with people from the Navajo Nation Reservation, and has made an in-depth study of the circumstances behind their living conditions and with the water management in the area.

The core of Elliot Ross’s approach centres around the time he takes to prepare and to dive into the material he photographs. In particular, building relationships is crucial to the productive management of a project. The photographer works on half a dozen series in parallel. His focus lies on long-term projects that evolve over years. For example, in addition to exploring the issue of unequal water consumption in this project, he time and again documents the increasingly visible effects of climate change in an indigenous Iñupiat village, in the northern and northwestern Arctic regions of Alaska.

When documenting the members of the Navajo Nation – who prefer to call themselves Diné, and whose their reservations stretch primarily over the states of Arizona (mainly northeastern), New Mexico (northwestern) and Utah (southeastern) – Ross wanted to be especially careful. For a long time, this ethnic group, comprising 330,000 tribal members, has been subject to a kind of narrative exploitation, the photographer explains. Therefore, he was particularly cautious, and started by building up trust and his own understanding. To this end, he made numerous trips to the Navajo Nation to get to know friends of friends, strangers, activists and political decision-makers.

A grant from the University of Colorado allowed Ross to spend two semesters in the lecture hall, exploring water law in the American West, the Manifest Destiny American ideology, hydrological research and the history of indigenous peoples. Two years after beginning his project, he moved with his wife to a remote village between Washington County and the Diné Reservation. When Ross had spoken, some years prior, to a friend from the Diné tribe about a project, the friend had suggested he look into the issue of water supply, as around one third of the Diné reportedly had no access to this resource in their homes. Ross refers to this idea as the starting point for his A Question of Balance series, where delved deeply into the workings of the local water management system, and discovered just how unequally the structure has been set up: the residents of Washington County consume above-average amounts of water, yet pay below-average rates for it. Whilst searching for the causes – as is his habit for all projects – the photographer was guided by an excerpt from the poem Desiderata, published in 1927 by the German-born lawyer Max Ehrmann. Ross always carries a printout of Desiderata in his pocket, where the second of ten paragraphs reads: “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they, too, have their story.”

When taking pictures, Ross’s primary intent is to be respectful and to create connections: “The expression ‘to take a photograph’ goes to the heart of the matter: the essence of photography is, by nature, extractive because it suggests you take the picture away from someone”. The greatest challenge, as far as he is concerned, is for images to bring about change – or even healing. This is important when dealing with such a central issue, which has the potential of leading to aggression. 

Elliot Ross’s series was submitted by Gonçalo Fonseca and Sarah Leen, who are part of this year’s group of international LOBA nominators.