Bear Guerra is a photographer whose work contemplates our connections to each other and the natural world, while addressing contemporary social, cultural and environmental issues. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Le Monde, BBC, and NPR, and has been exhibited widely. He was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Photojournalism. Bear and his wife, Ruxandra Guidi, work together under the name Fonografia Collective to produce local and international print, radio, and multimedia stories about human rights and social justice. Bear is also a board member and producer with the award-winning nonprofit journalism collaborative, Homelands Productions, and is the visuals editor at High Country News.
The delicate desert ecology of the Arizona Uplands relies on the annual arrival of monsoon season, with its dramatic storms and torrential downpours. As the rains become increasingly unpredictable, Tucson-based photographer Bear Guerra captures the sheer presence of this force in motion and the life that begins only in its wake.
In the Upland Arizona region, we have five seasons: autumn, winter, spring, foresummer, and summer monsoon. Traditionally, for the Tohono O’odham, the arrival of the summer rains marks the beginning of the new year, while according to the western calendar, monsoon season starts in early July and lasts through mid-September. The months preceding the onset of the season are hot and dry, leading to increasing humidity as winds moving in a clockwise pattern bring moisture from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California across northern Mexico and into southeastern Arizona. The atmospheric pressure builds for weeks before, hopefully, the first dramatic storm of the season brings relief, and when the rains come the desert ecosystem seems to almost instantaneously teem with life once again.
How many plant species might one write off as dead during the dry months, when in fact they are simply lying dormant, conserving resources while waiting for that first storm? How many plants sprout leaves or flowers in response to the torrential downpours that come only at this time of year? Here there are insects that only appear right after a monsoon season rain—their life cycles tied completely to it. The spadefoot toad, too, emerges from underground only after the first rain to lay its eggs in puddles left behind, the tadpoles growing in a race against time before the water disappears in the desert sun.
Like seasons everywhere, the monsoon is becoming more erratic. We all can’t help but wonder what will happen to the desert if at some point the monsoon no longer arrives.
Reflecting a world where snow no longer arrives, annual migrations fall out of time, yet first blossoms still burst, Seasons, our sixth print edition, moves through three themes: requiem, invitation, and celebration—each a contemplation on the paradoxical ways the seasons now beckon us into intimate relationship.
