The artist’s book Sanctus Sonorensis by Philip Zimmermann is straightforward in content yet complex in associational meanings. Through image and text it refers directly to the New Testament, the Sonoran Desert landscape, and illegal immigration, and also to religious pilgrimages and recent Arizona immigration laws. As a book it calls attention to its objectness with mass and weight—a thing with its own set of meanings. The figure/ground relationships are unambiguous in design yet complicated in translation. To fully engage Sanctus Sonorensis, one must read the words, the images, and the object, and let the mind travel through implied paths of meaning.

Zimmermann has been making artist’s books for thirty-five years, and publishing under the imprint Spaceheater Editions since 1979. A long-time faculty member at SUNY Purchase, he now teaches at the University of Arizona, Tucson. The book’s origins stem from a yearlong Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico, and a later residency at Light Work at Syracuse University. The residencies and eventual relocation to Arizona heightened his attention to the harsh physical and socio-political landscapes of the Mexico/U.S. border.

The Sonoran Desert straddles the 370-mile Arizona/Mexico border and is the busiest gateway for illegal immigration to the United States. Although arid, the Sonoran has relatively mild winters and bi-seasonal rainfall, attracting tourists to its winter resorts. On the other hand, it can be deadly for the thousands of illegal immigrants who make the 50-mile-wide desert crossing each year. Ground temperatures reach 130 degrees in the summer; people are forced to leave their belongings at the border to make the trek, do not carry enough water, are assaulted by bandits, and abandoned by smugglers whom they paid for safe crossing. The Arizona border is guarded by Border Patrol agents of the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection Agency, and is further monitored by the citizen’s activist organization, the Minuteman Project. Hundreds of miles of steel border fence are meant to work in concert with surveillance technology to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the border. There are other teams of people in the Sonoran desert with Good Samaritan intentions. Church groups make frequent trips to provide food, water, or medical help. The Border Action Network leaves emergency cans of water marked by blue flags. Even the Border Patrol has installed rescue beacons: thirty-foot towers whose strobe lights and radio signals are activated by a panic button. Look up Sonora on Dictionary.com and you will find a page sponsored by ads for criminal law resources, tourist hotels, and security fence systems. The contradictions are unavoidable.

The Latin to English translation of the word sonoren is to cry out, utter, to make a noise, sing, celebrate. Sanctus Sonorensis captures these dichotomies in a missal-like presentation of cries out of the desert, songs of thanks, and ritualized prayer. Intended to mimic Catholic breviaries, Zimmermann notes in his blog that “the text is meant to be read out loud as if by priest or an acolyte standing in front of a congregation (and maybe even repeated back by their flock).” The text embraces the language of the Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, given after his forty days and nights in the desert. These blessings contain the heart of his moral teachings with a revolutionary message of love, forgiveness, and living in peace. In Sanctus Sonorensis, the first blessing jars with the epithet “Blessed are the wetbacks,” used to define the Mexican laborers who enter the United States by wading across the Rio Grande River. Each two-page spread that follows blesses a group of vilified workers who support the local and tourist economies: “Blessed are the adobe brick makers,” the crop dusters, pool boys, bathroom attendants, onion packers, and gravediggers. A pause after the blessings, and then the instructions for forgiveness: “Let us forgive the Border Patrol,” the Minutemen, and la migra. Although the book was completed before its passage, the prayers undermine the suspicion and stridency of the 2010 immigration bill passed in Arizona.

The text is arranged one phrase at a time in a board-book construction that allows for uninterrupted landscapes without the gutter break of a sewn section binding. Printed in four-color offset lithography on varnished paper, the 11″ × 17″ spreads draw the reader into the space of the book and the photographed landscapes. The cover and first and last spreads depict the dry, unyielding desert: cracked red earth, prickly brush, and rough-edged rocks under a relentlessly blue sky. The mountains in the distance are a marker, but distances are deceiving, and it will take days to reach them. The images set the scene for a pilgrimage, and allude to a form of La Manda, i.e., Mexican ritual piety that can include crawling on knees to reach a holy shrine. These dry landscapes bracket the book’s interior of skyscape images. Arranged as the timeline of a single day, the darkened daybreak gives way to blue studded with white cumulous clouds, to a lightning-streaked sudden thunderstorm, and into the darkness after sunset. The moon rises on the final word: Amen.

Sanctus Sonorensis relates to a number of artists’ books that use the sky to consider time and journey. Most notable are Sol Lewitt’s Sunrise Sunset at Praino (1980), wherein a day is implied through grids of sky images, or Alec Finlay’s Wind Blown Cloud (2003), where the sky is a metaphor for journey. However neither of these books relies on words to complete their meaning as in Sanctus Sonorensis. These migrants have no sheltering sky, yet the prayers indicate a heavenward glance. The compounding of meaning is further emphasized by the figure/ground relationship of type positioned over images. The black-inked words hover over the landscape, and a whitish drop shadow separates the type from the background image, creating an ethereal halo effect. In a book that names groups of people, but provides no images of them, the words become the figures, floating through time and space. They represent the multitudes of immigrants, and at the same time are messages to and about them.

Finally, there is the object itself, which contains compound references to various forms of the book. With its rounded corners and gilt edges, it borrows the signs of a scripture book—but this is not the tissue-thin paper of personal bibles. It is printed on thick boards and is more tome than prayer book. At four-pounds it literally gives weight to its subject; it is too big to carry around for daily meditation. But the board book is also the binding style for baby and early childhood books. Tough and sturdy, board books are meant to survive rugged use. The content of those books is also relevant here: simple word-to-picture relationships and games of image identification that expand the young viewer’s cognitive sphere.

That cognitive expansion is the hope of Sanctus Sonorensis. It re-presents a familiar and difficult issue. It does not try to solve it, or make dramatic statements. Its visual beauty compels the reader to look again, and caught in that moment, reading becomes prayer.