In 2011 José Guerrero was awarded the XIV Manuel Rivera Grant which would allow him to work alongside Mark Klett at Arizona State University. From 2011–2013 he traveled throughout the southwestern United States in search of the natural monuments—the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and Yosemite— that had forged the image of the landscape of the North American west. But he also sought out images of human presence in this territory, truely modern tropes of the western experience, such as the great canyons carved out by highways crossing the landscape, and the fragile and solitary buildings.

His journey through this terrain, whose features make up the series After the Rainbow, is a passage through the footsteps of the North American photographic tradition. As if in an implicit dialogue, Guerrero’s images are reminiscent of Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places. In continuing with the iconographic tradition of this landscape, Guerrero avoids the motif’s novelty, producing serial works whose potency is partially constituted through variation and the syntax of the images.

In Little Colorado, Arizona, Guerrero’s gaze highlights dynamic forces, like telluric footprints,  that dramatize space and accentuate a metaphoric understanding of the riverbed as a symbol for the passing of time.