Imperial Valley, I-IV (2024)

Imperial Valley, California, was the site of many labour camps for migrant workers escaping the dust-bowl famines of the 1930s. Some of these camps were documented by photographer Dorothea Lange. Her 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson at the Nipomo camp in California came to symbolise the plight of migrant farmers across the country.

The ‘Imperial Valley’ project began in 2020 as a series of soundworks inspired by Lange’s photographs. They were described as ‘auditory nitrates after the work of Dorothea Lange’. Originally released via the cult underground label Other Forms of Consecrated Life, Imperial Valley migrated to Skelton’s own Folded Time imprint in 2022, allowing him to expand the project to incorporate his own ‘revisioned’ editions of Lange’s public domain photographs. Reproductions of Lange’s work were rephotographed and then superimposed to create ghostly double exposures that evoke the foreboding sense of unease of the Imperial Valley recordings. Two special editions have now been released that collate these experiments along with found texts from the 1930s, collaged from FSA reports, labour camp newsletters, posters and broadsides.