Mimi Plumb: 50 Years Photographing the West

“Walnut Creek is a sunny, upscale and comfortable city at the base of Mt. Diablo, offering culture, shopping, sports and cuisine.”

So says the city’s visitor and tourism website.

The city of just over 70,000 residents 25 miles east of San Francisco considers itself “Calipolitan,” a made-up marketing slogan. It boasts of “120+ elevated dining experiences,” whatever that means. “Award-winning shopping.” Whatever that means.

The average home price according to Zillow is $1,000,000, give or take, and that’s down almost 2% in the last year.

This is not the Walnut Creek photographer Mimi Plumb (b. 1953) grew up in.

“It was suburb under development back then. We are the first subdivision out there,” Plumb remembers. “This constant tearing apart of the land, bulldozers, building model homes that I didn't even as a kid find particularly attractive. The landscaping wasn't there, and it was just hot and dry and treeless because the trees were bulldozed down.”

Not “Calipolitan.”

Layered on top of that physical landscape was the political landscape.

The Cuban Missile Crisis: 1962.

“I remember having insomnia for a time when I was nine years old,” a passage from her photobook “Landfall” reads. “My mother told me there might be nuclear war. I spent many nights getting out of bed to look at the hallway clock late into the night. I also worried about not sleeping.”

Welcome to the Sixties.

President Kennedy would be assassinated 13 months later.

Plumb was 10.

The Vietnam War accelerates and, for the first time, images of maimed and mutilated bodies are beamed onto televisions – in color – around the country.

More assassinations. 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. most prominent among them, but hardly the only ones.

Plumb was early in her teenage years coming of age amongst a world tearing itself apart. Her Bay Area hometown was adjacent to the epicenter of activism and protest movements seeking to change all this, to create a better world. Anti-war, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, Summer of Love, Feminism, the Chicano Movement, Earth Day.

“Some of my most vivid memories are the 60s,” Plumb explained. “My parents were very progressive at the dinner table. I had three older brothers, two of them were at UC Berkeley during all of the protests. Public figures getting assassinated, that was horrifying.”

Mimi Plumb’s California and Western landscape photography embeds the visuals and violence she witnessed during her childhood. This is not Ansel Adams photographing sublime nature at Yosemite. Plumb’s landscapes are as much self-portrait and psychological profile of a region, as they are documentary. The diagnosis: anxiety.

“My work has always been a reflection, not only of the places I'm photographing, but of who I am in relationship to it,” she said.

Her first major body of work, “The White Sky” (1972-1978), explored the youthful restlessness prevalent in American suburbs. The suburban youthful restlessness she experienced. She photographed Walnut Creek and other communities around San Francisco in her late teens and early twenties. Only a few years older than her subjects, her photographs of teenagers running wild through the uniform suburban architecture, rambling through abandoned construction sites, exploring junkyards on the edge of town, show an empathy for their angst and boredom.

Mimi Plumb, ‘Crowd and Fire,’ 1976, pigmented inkjet print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchased with funds from Alan and Jewett Rothschild. Copyright Mimi Plumb.

“(My photography) is a personal journey through things I've experienced,” Plumb explained. “A portrait of me and my reaction to living through various things that are happening in the world.”

Plumb’s portrait/landscapes can be seen through May 10, 2026, during her first solo museum exhibition, “Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb,” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. On display are more than 100 photographs captured in and around San Francisco and across the American West.

The Day the Sun Didn’t Come Out

Now based in Berkeley, Plumb has photographed the human-altered landscape of California and the West with an eye toward the effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism, and looming military conflict for over 50 years.

Despite all she’s seen and experienced over a lifetime in the Bay Area, nothing could have prepared her for September 9, 2020: the day the sun didn’t come out in San Francisco. 

“It was during the pandemic, people here call it the Orange Day,” she said.

Orange because of how the extraordinary atmospheric conditions showed up as orange in iPhone pictures.

“There were a lot of forest fires happening during that summer. We were in the midst of the 23-year mega drought in Northern California,” Plumb said. “It was hot, dry. The place I normally walk, it's become just a dirt expanse. Nothing seemed to be growing. Everything seemed to be dying. We had many days during that summer when we had to keep our windows closed.”

But no days before like September 9.

“I got up in the morning and I looked outside and it was dark out. I don't mean dark like it's a dark winter day, the street lamps were on, it was like nighttime (and) stayed that way. The sun never appeared,” she continued. “It was fog mixing with the smoke and it didn't allow the sun to break through. Without somebody having experienced it, it's hard for people to really get it. It's just so creepy and weird.”

The fires were more than 100 miles away, but their scale and effects were felt widely across the region.

“It was a distinct call for me to try to figure out how to photograph this draught, and in a way that wasn’t me just photographing parched earth,” Plumb said.

The mega-drought reminded her of an earlier drought in 1976. She was living in Marin County north of the Bay at the time. She remembers Nicasio Reservoir and some of the others around there going dry.

But Plum didn’t simply want to shoot dried up lakes.

She visited the Folsom Lake State Recreation Area 30 miles northeast of Sacramento and found what she was looking for.

“It wasn't interesting to me just looking at the lake itself, at Folsom, though, there are still people interacting with the landscape, it's a recreational area,” she explained. “In the summer, they go there and they swim and have a day at the beach. At certain times of year, it's really beautiful.”

Plumb’s current body of work, “The Reservoir,” centers around Folsom Lake, a reservoir slowly going dry. Northern California had big rain in December, raising the water level, but little since then.

Weaving together images of the dry lake bed and people seeking recreational respite from the heat, Plumb’s new photographs are an ongoing exploration of how droughts, climate change and persistent anxiety collectively affect life in the West. In what she describes as the “relentless aridity” of the lake bed, Plumb finds a corollary for the human psyche as it grapples with chronic precarity. 

Mimi Plumb, ‘Traveling to the Receding Lake II,’ 2021–2025, pigmented inkjet print, courtesy of the artist. Copyright Mimi Plumb.

“Here was this lake drying up, but there are people wandering through the dried lake bed walking down to the water,” Plumb said. “Sometimes that would be more than a mile walking through 110-degree heat together, and they'd be carrying all their stuff, trudging along with your kids.”

As a redhead living under California’s glaring sun, Plumb has always been empathetic to people suffering in the heat.

“The sun's beating down on them, they’re wearing flip flops, that juxtaposition was really intense and heartbreaking,” Plumb said. “There's a picture I have, in the distance there's a little girl, and she's got the inner tube around her, and she's walking through this dried, parched landscape, and you can see that there's not any water near. She and her mother are heading down to the lake. This is something that I could photograph – and get it – how it feels right now to be living in an environment with this kind of global warming.”

After debuting at the High, Plumb’s exhibition will travel to three more venues: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.