When the road gets tough, sometimes the best thing you can do is unplug and get outside.
That’s exactly what Deidre Rosenberg did.
“For the past several years, I have been taking a really deep dive into the San Juan Mountains and the Four Corners area as a whole on kind of a quest that I have called ‘Healing in the Southwest,’” she said. “This happened because I lost in a very short period of time my parents, and I had two very complicated miscarriages.”
For more information
To participate in Deirdre Rosenberg’s Kickstarter campaign for her book, “Healing in the Southwest,” visit https://tinyurl.com/52trzscd.
For more about Rosenberg, visit her website: www.deirdredenaliphotography.com.
A conservation photographer by trade, Rosenberg said she immerses herself in landscapes – and animals – not easily accessible to many people.
“I work with endemic species to the San Juan Mountains. The American pika is first and foremost (what) I work with. I also work with a lot of different fragile alpine creatures. I also study mountain goats as a study of invasive species,” she said. “Right now, I am working with the Uncompahgre Watershed Partnership to get them photography needs, and all of this goes hand in hand with the fine art photography that I do. I try to walk a line between what is art and what is more or less science photography.”
Rosenberg said in an effort to get future stewards excited about how beautiful and exciting nature is, she also takes groups of children up into the alpine to show them the animals.
So when it came time to try to find some peace, she knew where to go, and the result is her new book of landscape photography, “Healing in the Southwest,” for which Rosenberg currently has a Kickstarter campaign to help get it published.
“I think I am kind of a person who gets really wrapped up in my own emotions, and it’s hard for me to take myself out of it,” she said. “So by pushing myself physically – I did have a lot of mountaineering experience, so that didn’t just come out of nowhere – my physical exertion always matched my level of grief. I was able to be alone with my thoughts; I was able to just think about things. Then, of course, when we are talking about the landscapes that we call home, you just feel tiny and you feel so insignificant, and I think when we’re dealing with really big emotions that we don’t really know how to process, sometimes feeling really small can help us to have more perspective and put us in our place of the grand scheme of things – that this is kind of just what life is.”
“Healing in the Southwest” is a fine art photography book interspersed with journal entries, musings, poems and written expression, Rosenberg says on her Kickstarter campaign page. It will be published as a cloth-wrapped, hardcover first edition with a dust jacket. It will be over 100 pages long with more than 100 landscape images.
The project began at the end of 2019, she said, and the collection of photos include mostly images from the San Juan Mountains. It also includes shots from the Four Corners past Farmington in the Bisti Badlands. “All very local,” she said.
The Kickstarter campaign ends on July 24, and the book will be published beginning in September and shipped out on Oct. 1.
“I really believe in the power of photography, where you might not need to be there if you can experience these photos with my words to kind of bring you into that place,” Rosenberg said. “This is really my effort to share the places that I’ve been.”
katie@durangoherald.com
