San Rafael Zine
San Rafael Zine
San Rafael photo zine traces the ancient corridors that created the Old Spanish Trail through Utah's San Rafael Swell—the northernmost reach of a trade route that enabled centuries of Indigenous enslavement. It's a series of 18 landscape photographs Russel made documenting the remote corridors where Navajo, Ute, Apache, and Paiute captives were trafficked between New Mexico and California from the 1700s through the mid-1800s.
The landscapes in this zine are haunted by hidden histories. Where the trail crossed the treacherous Green River and navigated the San Rafael Swell, thousands of Indigenous people—primarily women and children—were moved as commodities in a brutal slave trade operated by Spanish colonizers, Mexican traders, Mormon settlers, and raiding parties.
This work is part of La Cautiva, Russel's ongoing documentary project examining Indigenous captivity and enslavement in the American Southwest. The photographer's own Diné ancestor, Rose, was captured during a Ute slave raid in the 1850s and trafficked along routes near these landscapes.
This zine was created during an Epicenter Frontier Fellowship, which allowed Russel to walk corridors shaped by 12,000 years of human migration through central Utah. These natural passages, marked by ancestral Barrier Canyon style pictographs throughout the region, were used by Ute and related bands for millennia before becoming part of the Old Spanish Trail. Standing where the trail crossed the vital Green River corridor, each photograph becomes a meditation on the continuity of human movement through landscape and the stories of both trauma and survival carved into sandstone and time. This work challenges official narratives that erase Indigenous presence and colonial violence, creating counter-histories that center Indigenous experiences and survival.
The 5.5" x 7" black and white zine format reveals the stark beauty and isolation of these high desert corridors, inviting reflection on the violence and Indigenous presence embedded in these seemingly empty places.
Funding provided by Epicenter in Green River, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Utah Division of Arts and Museums.
Each zine:
1000 word text essay
5.5" x 7"
18 black & white photos
40 pages printed on #32 paper
Laser copy printed
Saddle-stitched binding
Edition one printed and paginated in Salt Lake City, Utah. November 2025
$5.00 s/h fee added per order in USA. Mailed through USPS. Utah state sales taxes added at checkout.
Contact russel@russeldaniels.com for International orders and shipping.
Mailed on Wednesdays.