Before Flint, before ever-expansive wildfires annually ravaged her home state of California and much of the west coast, yet after the popular introduction of bottled water to the American consciousness in the 1990s, Sant Khalsa discovered a store called Water Shed through her ongoing research on issues pertaining to water in the west, and photographed it.That was the first of what would become her series "Western Waters." The sixty gelatin-silver photographs, made between 2000 and 2002, depict water stores in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and Southern Nevada. At that time, Khalsa said of this work: "the photographs will serve in the future as a historical document of either a fleeting fad, or the foundation of what will become commonplace in our society."Six years later, Elizabeth Royte, speaking about her publication Bottlemania (Bloomsbury, 2008) on NPR's Talk of The Nation, said, "the big message in the book is that if our political leaders continue to underfund and ignore the nation's water infrastructure, and the public continues to flee municipal supplies for private [water purchase], these systems are going to degrade to the point where only people who can afford to buy good water are going to have it." We are living in that sad reality.Twenty years have passed since Khalsa completed this photographic project. Bottled water is an over $11 billion dollar industry, yet millions of Americans are daily affected by the lack of access to clean drinking water. The existence of these stores in the early part of the millennium played on human fears and desires-never-ending thirsts-that have become need in a very short period of time.