Salt Dreams

Leaving the bustle of the music scene of New York City, where they now live and work, photographers Jimmy and Dena Katz headed out West to make a personal landscape project in and around the Salt Flats of northern Utah. Standing on the shore of the Great Salt Lake with a stark, almost surreal view stretching ahead, they came upon a trio of plastic pink flamingoes abandoned in the water. Inspired by the odd juxtaposition of the timeless and transient, they circled the lake seeking other such moments, and then pushed on to the flats. Again and again they discovered human possessions and personal obsessions flung onto the salt surface against undulating mountains and boundless sky. They became intrigued by the inventors who, with their hand-built hotrods, racecars, and rockets, participate in the annual rituals and races on the Salt Flats—making their own statement in the landscape. The photographs of people and objects that the Katz’s encountered are collected for the first time in Salt Dreams, an ironic and haunting comment on the audacity and fragility of human dreams, and a new dream itself.