The images in "American Nature" were made over the course of several long-distance road trips across the United States. During these trips, I sought the iconic nature and geology contained within America's borders. I immersed myself in the protected and preserved landscapes of national parks, national forests, and nature preserves to better understand the conflict of a society that reveres and celebrates select natural spaces while continuing to exploit and degrade the natural world outside of them. At its heart, this project is an exploration of our current era of climate change—an examination that attempts to explore a planet and its ecosystems as they grapple with the magnitude of human-induced change.
Using a full-spectrum digital camera, the photographs capture both visible and infrared light, revealing the unseen and blurring the boundary between the known and unknowable. Their dreamlike appearance aims to remove the human-oriented perspective, thrusting the viewer into a space of ambiguity, somewhere between reality and the surreal. Drenched in hues of cyan and crimson, the photographs reference KODAK Aerochrome and its historic military use of surveillance and reconnaissance of war-ravaged landscapes. Like those landscapes of war, nature is embroiled in a conflict, forced to react, and transform to the impact of humanity instead of its natural mechanisms. As it changes, it becomes unfamiliar to us, increasingly perilous and unpredictable.
Earth is in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, shaped by the powerful forces of volcanoes, tectonic shifts, glaciers, and erosion. The images of "American Nature" show fragments of these mutations that have sculpted the world over millennia, their time scale operating far outside the realm of human perception. Climate change has altered these natural rhythms. Environmental shifts that would have taken place over thousands of years are occurring on a rapidly quickening timeline. Just as we strive to adapt, so too will Earth.
