America's Dead Sea

In “America’s Dead Sea,” award-winning photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo serves up a beautiful but disturbing document of the Salton Sea, the heavily polluted saline lake southeast of Los Angeles. Lo Scalzo manages to find a fresh perspective on the notorious, much photographed sea, which was formed  in a desert basin when the Colorado River flooded just over 100 years ago. With no outflow, and with farm runoff as its only inflow, the body of water has become increasingly contaminated and saline over the years. Lo Scalzo’s short, which recently won a World Press Photo multimedia award, traces the area’s decline from a major tourist attraction to a lifeless toxic dump. It’s a powerful piece. Plus there’s some ukelele music, so that’s cool.