For years Alfredo De Stefano has photographed the Chihuahua desert landscape with different emphases and perspectives. Slowly De Stefano has evolved from overt intervention of his prints by painting on them trees and tumbleweeds where there were none, to direct intervention of the actual desert that occurs before the photographic act takes place. De Stefano's meditations about what the desert is and what is happening to it is not merely aesthetic, it is also environmentally sensitive, philosophical and even metaphysical. He is as much concerned with the desert as a place of spiritual reckoning, as with the living organisms for which it is a habitat, and with denouncing the practice of some desecrators of its landscape that use it as a garbage dump. The three images that are included in this exhibit &emdash;"Spine," "Tomb" and "Where the rocks lie"&emdash;belong to his more interventionist period. "Spine" is a drawing with stones on the desert's cracked soil of a structure that resembles a spinal column &endash;as if the desert itself were a vertebrate relative of ours. "Where the rocks lie" appears to depict rocks drawn to a moist spot in the desert, congregating in a circular pattern around a darker area of the soil. In "Tomb" rocks are disorganized and scattered like living matter disorganizes and decomposes when it dies.

"la tumba"

"la columna"