Landscapes of Hope – Stephen Strom

Landscapes of Hope brings together photographs from Utah’s Greater San Rafael Swell, a vast region of mesas, deserts, canyons, rivers, reefs, and high plateaus shaped by more than 350 million years of geological history. But this exhibition is about more than landscape. It is also about the possibility of finding common ground on sometimes bitterly contested land.

This exhibition celebrates the efforts of Emery County citizens who, over more than two decades, gradually forged consensus around the future of nearly one million acres of public land. Ranchers, conservationists, tribal representatives, recreationists, miners, and local leaders moved from conversations around kitchen tables and back porches to negotiations in Washington, D.C., ultimately helping shape the landmark John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act of 2019. Their work showed that people with profoundly different ties to the same landscape can nonetheless shape its future together.

The photographs in this exhibition were made over more than two decades from both ground and air. Together, they attempt to convey the scale, complexity, and enduring beauty of the Greater Swell: landscapes shaped by uplift, erosion, water, wind, and time beyond ordinary human reckoning.