Recording Our Impact

I ran across a couple of articles this week that covered photographic responses to the human impact of our expansion in the Western US. The first is an interview with Robert Adams on Bloomberg.com. A small reproduction of one of Adams' images in the 2001 MoMA Gursky retrospective catalog introduced me to his amazing work from the Colorado Front Range, and eventually to his many writings about what it means to be a photographer and how looking at the world photographically relates to living life.

"I was distressed by the inhumanity and greed I was looking at in terms of what human beings were doing, but I was also swept away by the grandeur of the light sweeping over this landscape. In the main, I've tried to talk about both things at once."

Smithsonian features David Maisel's mind bending aerial work.

Maisel also wants to challenge our notions of beauty. He thus describes the usual reaction to his work as "this experience where people are seduced by the seeming surface beauty of an image, and then as they learn more about what it is they may be looking at, they realize that there is, in a way, a betrayal." Bright colors become ugly stains, painterly strokes morph into indelible gouges and marbled veneers turn out to be leached toxins.