Prior Tempore, Potior Iure

DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY · COLORADO · BOOK FORTHCOMING

A black and white photo of a house on a hill under construction, with scaffolding visible around it. In the foreground, there is a sign that says 'END' and a smaller sign with circular patterns, along a roadside.
“The material dissolves. The memory fades. The spirit ?”
— Phel Steinmetz, In Passing

This is what I found.

In 1859, prospectors arriving in the Colorado territory adopted a simple rule for distributing scarce water among competing claims: first in time, first in right. The rule worked for miners. It was written into the Colorado Constitution of 1876, and it has governed the state's relationship to its land — mineral, water, and agricultural — ever since.

The Doctrine of Prior Appropriation does not ask whether a use is just. It asks whether it was first.

This project examines what that accounting has produced. Three extraction economies, across three chapters, over nearly two centuries of extraction, settlement, and erasure. The land is not the backdrop here. It is the primary witness — the record of every claim made, cost transferred, and debt deferred.

The title translates from the Latin: prior in time, stronger in right.

I — Prospect

The doctrine arrived before the state did. Those racing westward in 1859 had no legal framework, no courts, no surveyors — only the rule they made for themselves in the absence of one: whoever arrived first took the most.

What they found was a landscape with no record of them. What they left was a landscape that records little else.

A snow-covered highway with utility poles along the side, a road sign indicating Route 285 South, and a foggy, overcast sky.
Wide view of a rural landscape with dry grass, a barbed wire fence, hills in the background, and a clear blue sky.
A mountain landscape with rugged peaks, some snow patches, forested slopes, and a small cabin in a valley surrounded by trees and colorful shrubs.
A long stretch of abandoned railway tracks running through an open landscape with dry grass and sparse trees, under a cloudy sky with dark storm clouds and distant snow-capped mountains.

II — Growth

Settlements followed the claims. Canvas gave way to timber, timber to board-and-batten, board-and-batten to brick where the ore held long enough. Post offices appeared. Saloons. A school, sometimes. The infrastructure of permanence, built on the assumption that the resource would last.

It rarely did.

Interior of a rustic wooden cabin with large bay windows looking out onto a landscape of trees and hills, unfinished wooden floor, and a weathered wood ceiling.
Close-up of torn, old newspaper pages and weathered papers attached to a wooden surface, some partially curled or faded.
View from inside an abandoned building looking out through an open window at a scenic mountain landscape with lush green trees and mountain peaks in the background.
Close-up of weathered wooden planks and rusted metal L-brackets fastened with bolts.

III — Decay

The elements do not distinguish between what was built to last and what was not. Foundations remain where structures don't. Water reclaims what it was diverted from. Fields return to the forms the soil preferred before the plow.

What persists is not the dream but its outline — the final ledger of a debt the river can no longer pay.

A dry, barren area with a rectangular concrete structure in the foreground, small scattered objects, a body of water, and hills with cloudy sky in the background.
The image shows the remains of a collapsed wooden structure, with broken and charred wood, against a cloudy sky and mountains in the background.
A dry, arid landscape with sparse shrubbery, a leafless tree, and distant hills under a clear blue sky.
A lake with a rocky shoreline and distant hills under a clear sky at sunset.