ABSTRACT
The desert is the proverbial projection plane in the Western imagination, a kind of tabula rasa on which utopias, urban, architectural, and religious, can rise ex novo—Salt Lake City and Las Vegas come to mind. Today, the grand panorama the people are all familiar with from films and pictures usually has to be taken from a secured vantage point anyhow. Lachauer's moving image and photographic practice is located in what during the last decades has become a "third", a new field in between art and anthropology. This new field encompasses parts of what art historians have termed the "ethnographic turn" and builds on the reflexive turn in anthropology associated with the so-called Writing Culture critique. In visual anthropology, Lucien-Castaing Taylor's Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard has been at the forefront of exploring new sensory approaches.
