Lewis Baltz’s photographic portfolios Nevada (1977) and Near Reno (1986) anticipate the work Richard Misrach and Peter Goin each composed in the state of Nevada in the early 1990s: from shot-up junk, to the military theater of Bravo 20, to the Nevada Test Site, these imagemakers represented topographies of violence in the desert. This essay offers a close reading of Baltz’s Nevada images to consider the way light and waste in the landscape are mobilized to register how sociohistorical discourses of the desert perhaps make such spaces vulnerable to urbanization and how these tropes encode the process in a language of violence.