Desert Pictures

BACKGROUND Drawing on discourses around representations of nature, Desert Pictures investigates ways that pictorial conventions of landscape images can be reassessed through artistic production of photography, video, and sculpture. Desert Pictures explores the notion of landscape and questions how an environment is imaged and framed, asking: can a materialist rethinking of photo-media productively work against the limits of representationalism? CONTRIBUTION Desert Pictures examines the possibility of problematising landscape photography, and related media, through a perspective that considers the agency of the environment being depicted. Plants, animals, minerals, the sun, and rain all directly interact with photo-media through mostly camera- less techniques. This methodology, wherein the physical materiality of an environment becomes both the subject of the work and the means to create it, opens up the photographic field by employing new ways to depict a locale. In this project, the materials and processes of photo-media are used to think through issues of representation with the intent to deconstruct the conceptual frame of landscape. SIGNIFICANCE The project was developed through a fellowship with the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Arizona, USA. Several artworks from the project (selected by Chief Curator Joshua Chuang), were acquired by the CCP, the most significant photographic archive in North America. Notably, these alternative landscape images are now a part of the research collection that cemented the understanding of landscape photography, having been co-established by Ansel Adams. In addition to an exhibition at Lionel Rombach Gallery at the University of Arizona, individual works from the project were exhibited in at the CCP, in Fauna (juror William Wegaman), and in Radical Color (curated by Jon Fienstein). A selection of works was published on featureshoot.com, a major international photographic website.