Debra Bentley is a photographer from Denver, Colorado temporarily living and working in Vacaville, California. Her work focuses primarily on the documentation of places and environments, their connection to the internal parts of people, and the need to see and record this connectivity.
Her work documenting the Salton Sea in Imperial County, California, was the subject of the monograph Salton Sea: of Dust and Water published by Daylight Books in 2020. The project, and subsequent book, captured the Salton Sea and dust remediation projects in 2018: the first-year state and federally mandated water transfers ended to the Sea. Images from this body of work have been featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
She is currently working on a number of projects, most notably Dammed; The Birth and Death of the Over Allocated Colorado River. In this project, she will photograph the 15 dams and diminishing flow on the main stem of the Colorado River, one of the most controlled and overallocated rivers in the world. The project will photograph the headwaters of the river in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado to its death at the Arizona/Mexico border.
