Fake Lakes and Other Curious Sites (2017 - 2020)

Working in the vein of traditional landscape photography, I set out to document nondescript sites of human and technological intervention. I allude to the story of the place through contemporary imaging strategies that alter its representation. The history of human intervention in the landscape is often invisible to the casual observer, yet it is drastically transformative and impacts the future ecological state of the site.

An artificial lake is installed by damming a river in the Blue Ridge Mountains; major watersheds are contaminated with coal ash and hog waste; mountaintop fields are manicured and clear-cut for tourist enjoyment; a dune that naturally shifts over time is kept in place with truckloads of sand dumped on top. Some of these things are nefarious. Some of them are curious. None of them are necessarily evident to the casual observer.

By using artificial lighting at the point of capture, and Photoshop blending algorithms to stand in as visual metaphors for these interventions, I blur the line between the landscape as seen and the landscape as reimagined by technological processes. In the same way that an intervention may set a series of unforeseen events into motion, I grapple with the unexpected in the image-making process. I cannot precisely control how light may affect a scene outside of the studio. In the Autoblend Iterations, I cannot predict the iterations of my landscapes that Photoshop will generate, and the image of the landscape often becomes marred or strangely cut out, leaving pixelated marks as a sign of the algorithmic process. Throughout this work, I challenge the veracity of the photograph by fictionalizing the original document with these processes, but still presenting scenes that reference the actual documented site. This tension with control over final output mirrors the unpredictable results when humans intervene with natural processes.