The Project

When we envisioned this project our hope was and still is to use the photographs as a means to bring the river to people to inspire a desire to get to know the river better and ultimately to ensure the Rio Grande is sustained.  While the book has been the first and perhaps the most conventional way to meet that goal we also envision using the photographs in multiple other ways to tell the river’s story. We plan to create a traveling exhibit, documentary film on the making of The Rio Grande: An Eagle’s View, and numerous multi-media presentations for showings in communities throughout the Rio Grande watershed.

Our current priority is to create a 65-photograph exhibit of the river from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico.  Our goal is to create a traveling exhibit that could not only be placed in large cities such as El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson and Austin, but also one that could be available to small towns from Alamosa, CO to Brownsville, TX.  WildEarth Guardians is currently working to raise the funds to produce and schedule the exhibit.  For more information about the status of this effort please contact John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians.

In addition to the exhibition we also intend to create a film that tells the story about the Rio Grande and how this decade-long project came to fruition. In the last two years of taking photographs for this project Adriel Heisey began to take high quality video footage of the river and the process of shooting photographs from his small airplane. We are currently in discussions with KNME, the Albuquerque public television station, about a possible collaboration to tell the story of the making of these magnificent images.