Despite the prodigious number of roadside memorials found in the Northern New Mexico landscape, unknown to most, is the significance of the powerful and poignant descansos erected for years by the Hispanic community. In the exhibition at the Historic Santa Fe Foundation September 2-30, 2022, Mortal Highway: The Photographs Judith Hidden Lanius offers a unique and highly personal view of descanso culture through her photographs. Through September 30 at El Zaguán More Information

"Mortal Highway: The Photographs"  Exhibition - El Zaguán

Mortal Highway featured in the Blind Magazine

“Unlike me, artist and photographer Judith Hidden Lanius would have stopped and made the photo. In fact, over the course of a decade, she traced thousands of miles of New Mexico’s roads and took pictures of these handmade memorials as she came upon them. She’s collected 50 of her images in a tightly focused, quietly stirring new book, Mortal Highway (Daylight Books).” Read More

Mortal Highway featured in the ‘The Eye of Photography’ Magazine

“The photographs show how descansos incorporate objects of religious significance and personal mementos from the life of the deceased. This public mourning ritual turns highway shoulders into sacred spaces holding memories and cautionary tales for those driving by.” Read More

Mortal Highway featured in the Albuquerque Journal

“In her new book “Mortal Highway,” New Mexico-based photojournalist Judith Hidden Lanius investigates the culture of roadside memorials put up by the Hispanic community in northern New Mexico.

Lanius offers a unique and highly personal perspective of descanso culture through her images connected with prose and lyrical verse motivated by her conversations with the families of the victims.” Read More

Mortal Highway featured in Arts Konbini

“Throughout the pages of her book Mortal Highway , Judith Hidden Lanius explores grief – her own, towards people she will never meet but whose absence she feels, as well as that of the families and loved ones she has met.'“ Read More

Mortal Highway feature on Daylight Publishing website

“In an age when the larger Christian culture tends to minimize death rituals, descansos, Spanish for “resting places,” are part of an enduring tradition of communal grief marked in a most public place.” Read More