Surfacing

BACKGROUND The discourse around landscape photography has established that it is as much a cultural construct as it is a representation of nature. While the anthropocentric implications of landscape photography have been examined, the field has to a great extent neglected to consider the significance of the agencies of the environment itself and the photo-imaging materials. The project Surfacing asks how artworks can make visible the relationship between the forces and composition of the earth and photomedia that 'capture' and represent the earth. CONTRIBUTION Surfacing is a camera-less project that explores the materiality of photomedia and the potential for a new kind of landscape photography through a methodology in which natural phenomena in Iceland is both the subject of and the means to create artworks. While landscape photography historically depicts scenery and implies distance, this project makes a literal connection between the forces of an environment and a photographic image. Physically exposing photographic paper to the chemistry, heat, and moisture of geyser plumes and steam vents creates unpredictable forms and colours. The aesthetic traces emerge through correspondences between the silver halide particles suspended in a substrate of gelatin on the surface of paper, the chemical and temperature composition of the geothermal features, the UV rays from the sun, and the duration of contact. Through enfolding earth processes with the materiality of photomedia, the photographic surfaces are inscribed with the material conditions of their making as a way to reconfigure what landscape photography can be. SIGNIFICANCE Images from the Surfacing portfolio and a statement about the project was included in Antennae: The Journal Nature in Visual Culture, an international, peer-reviewed, academic journal on the subject of nature in contemporary art.