Shawn Marie Graybeal-Sellers

Some mornings on the way to school I pull over and just look east.

The Sandia Mountains rise 10,000 feet above Albuquerque’s east side, a wall of pink granite that has watched every version of this city, from the first Pueblo settlements to the sprawling desert metropolis it is today. On clear days they turn watermelon pink at sunset and everyone stops what they’re doing. But the mornings I can’t stop thinking about are the cloudy ones — the days when overnight weather piles clouds against the western face of the mountain and they spill over the crest like waves breaking over a reef, slow and enormous and completely silent. The sun rises behind the ridge and the light finds the clouds from the other side, turning them pink, then orange, then a color that doesn’t have a name in English. The whole sky is moving. The whole sky is on fire.

And ten minutes later it’s gone, and I am standing in a parking lot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the day can wait.

This is what I have been trying to explain to people for forty years.

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I have lived in New Mexico since December 1984. I came because of the Air Force. I stayed because the historian in me recognized that I was standing in one of the most layered and consequential landscapes in North America and I wasn’t done with it yet. Forty years later I am still not done.

The Light Here Is Different is the project that came out of that stubbornness.

It is a hybrid photo-essay book exploring New Mexico’s iconic and hidden places — from some of the oldest human sites on the continent to the landscapes of the atomic age. Organized across six regions, the project pairs seventy-four iconic locations with lesser-known counterparts, examining more than one hundred forty places through original photography and long-form essays. Nine thread essays trace the deeper forces that shaped the state — the Camino Real and the Pueblo Revolt, Route 66, the Long Walk, the Civil War campaign up the Rio Grande, the Manhattan Project, and the legacy of uranium mining on the lands of the people who lived above it.

Part travel narrative, part historical exploration, and part photographic record — it is a forty-year reckoning with a place that resists explanation and demands attention.

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I’ll be sharing photographs, excerpts, and the story of making this book here and on Instagram as the work develops. Some of what you’ll see is already written. Much of it is still being discovered — on back roads, in archives, in conversations with people who know this state more deeply than I ever will.

The light here really is different. I’ve been trying to explain it for forty years.

This is my best attempt.