Turning to LED light mapping, I have created a series of photographs that address my anxiety for the future of our planet and seek to extend the capacity of the photographic image to depict a deeper truth. Traveling across the country, I have documented both the beautiful and the already disfigured landscapes of America, chronicling impacts from climate change that are sometimes obvious and other times invisible to the naked eye. The landscapes depicted comment on our denialist tendencies to see only what we want to believe—to deny our lifestyles are harming our planet and to see America as an enduring symbol of beauty, abundance and resilience. My photographs serve to disturb this pretense, layering climate change data visualizations and tales of its impacts which confront the viewer with a reality divergent from the one the camera alone can capture.
In the LED Light Mapped images, I photograph
landscapes at dusk using long exposures. During the exposure I walk a programmable
light stick through the space as it reads out a digital file from left to
right. In essence, I am imprinting an image into the landscape using light as I
capture an image with my camera.