Twelve Thousand Years
Twelve Thousand Years, is a limited edition of medium-format photographs by artist Lincoln Schatz featuring the landscapes of the American Southwest. A project created by Schatz across multiple trips, the photographs in this edition document a unique and multifaceted environment that results from the confluence of desert, mountain and plateau.
This is a place where humans have lived for nearly twelve thousand years. The traces of their civilizations, religious sites and daily lives are still present today in what is known as Zion National Park.
“It is such a special and specific landscape. Towering cliffs and deep river valleys come together to form remarkable geological formations that can be seen throughout these photographs. I have returned here on multiple trips, drawn to the narrow slot canyons, the quality of light and the remarkable plants and animals that populate the region.”
Lincoln Schatz
Zion National Park is Utah’s first national park. Established initially as a national monument in 1909 and then as a national park in 1919. Today this status allows for the protection of both the landscape and the important archeological sites located within the park.
Three ecosystems converge in Zion National Park. Where the edges of the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert all come together. Each of these ecosystems are found in the Twelve Thousand Years edition.
The geological foundation of the region begins two hundred and seventy million years ago. Over time sediment first deposited by oceans and then rivers, lakes and floodplains continued to add new layers of material, becoming a tangible visual record of expansive time, stretched over millions of years and captured here in photographs by Schatz.
Sandstone cliff faces erupt from the ground in Schatz’s photographs, these slowly eroding cliffs creating vast canyon systems that continue to be shaped today, altered by water, wind and time. The erosion of this soft stone creates fascinating geological structures that change form over time.
“Understanding this landscape means understanding, not just the geology or the wilderness found today, but also the ways humans lived here successfully for millennia. There is much we can learn today about the way Indigenous People, from the Ancestral Puebloans, to the Paiute and the Shoshone have stewarded and lived in harmony with this land for thousands of years.”
Lincoln Schatz
In Twelve Thousand Years, Schatz works his way through the canyons, tracing the trails that began to appear as the first humans arrived. Drawn to the region tracking and hunting large animals, over the ensuing thousands of years inhabitants would shift between hunting and gathering, farming and other agricultural models for survival.
In this unique place, these groups took advantage of the sheltered lands, readily accessible water and long growing seasons created by the micro-climates found deep in the slot canyons to grow crops in the nutrient rich soil found alongside rivers and streams.
Scrub and small trees, designed through evolution to withstand the harsh conditions found on the mountainsides, cover much of the upper climes seen in this edition. Finding ingenious ways to survive in thin soil and on the rock faces that ring the valleys. In spring the low lying lands erupt in verdant greens, lush with new growth.
Beginning fifteen hundred years ago and lasting for the following seven hundred years, the Ancestral Puebloans lived in this valley, creating villages whose traces remain today. They created cliff-dwellings, granaries and religious sites across many generations. These places are now important archeological sites, highlighting a people with advanced understanding of the celestial sciences who grew crops that included corn, beans and squash on the land that is now Zion National Park. The histories of this agricultural past connect the initial deposits of sediment through to contemporary time, linking one people to the next.
Perhaps today this landscape is closer to the wilderness first described by Mormons when they arrived and claimed ownership of this place, renaming it Zion in the process. The descriptions of what they had arrived to are misleading, although in line with the ideas of Manifest Destiny put forth as settlers expanded westward. In the eyes of settlers the landscape was wild, untamed and importantly, though erroneously, without people.
This landscape however, like much of the American West, was far from wilderness and in the case of Zion National Park already populated by Indigenous people. By the time the Mormons arrived, the Paiute, the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans were living on this land, engaging in a society primarily focused around hunting and gathering. Unfortunately, along with the arrival of the early, mostly Mormon settlers, came the diseases and destructive farming practices that they brought with them, decimating the Southern Paiute population and leading to their disappearance from the land.
“This is a landscape where you can feel the history as you move through it. The traces of civilizations appear before you and are everywhere in the park. You can understand why so many different people, over thousands of years, came to this place and continue to do so today…”
“The light found in Zion National Park is incredibly special, the geology and landscape provide rich textural surfaces full of subtle variation in color and tone that the sun interacts with beautifully.”
Lincoln Schatz
Early people to this region left traces not just of their buildings and farms, but also the art that they created about this place, found in the petroglyphs that remain on the cliff walls and rocks in the park today. This tradition of art continues after their departure, connecting painters and photographers, like Frederick S Dellenbaugh who arrived alongside the first U.S. Geological Survey in 1872 as well as later artists like Howard Russell Butler and others who were drawn by the grandeur of this landscape. A tradition that Schatz follows in today.
Twelve Thousand Years is a limited edition of photographs now available for purchase. More information on Lincoln Schatz’s editions, including edition size, framing, and pricing can be found here. If interested in purchasing any of these works, please be in touch.