Photographer Maureen Bond chose the California desert as the starting point for In Every Language: Love, her photographic project dedicated to Salvation Mountain. Not far from the Salton Sea, this artificial hill rises from the landscape like an oversized apparition: entirely covered in paint, slogans, and saturated colors. Built over more than thirty years by Leonard Knight as an act of personal faith, the mountain has gradually become a spontaneous monument to devotion, but also a place of passage, curiosity, and welcome for anyone crossing that stretch of desert. It is precisely from this tension between spirituality and landscape that Bond’s work takes shape.

Initially drawn by the mountain’s visual impact, Bond began photographing Salvation Mountain guided more by intuition than by a rigid structure. Her images embrace the unpredictability of the place: details emerging between cracks and brushstrokes, painted words dissolving into the light, organic shapes that seem to grow directly from the earth. Photography thus becomes an extension of the mountain’s very nature, made of simple materials, handmade interventions, and constant transformations.

Rather than documenting the site as a cultural icon, In Every Language: Love seeks to capture its emotional atmosphere. In these images, connection does not pass through people, but through the space and the gesture that generated it: the care, dedication, and time Leonard Knight poured into the construction of this symbolic landscape. Every painted surface becomes a trace of that act of devotion, transforming the mountain into a message that is both public and intimate.

In Bond’s work, Salvation Mountain appears as an open language, capable of speaking to anyone who encounters it. Painted words such as “God is Love,” repeated like a visual mantra, coexist with intensely colorful atmospheres. It is an immediate language, because it is rooted in a universal idea of welcome: anyone can arrive here and feel part of something.

At a historical moment marked by borders, divisions, and increasingly polarized identities, the mountain in the desert continues to suggest a different possibility. Even in the most unexpected places, it seems to tell us, it is still possible to create a shared space.

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