Amanda Keller Konya
Specimens From America's Most Polluted River
Common modes of conveying information, such as science and journalism, fail to represent the complex reality of the New River, which flows north from Mexico into California — its use by illegal immigrants as a crossing point, its toxic state, the way it marks the boundary between public and private space. I was especially moved to undertake this project when I learned that the river, containing DDT, PCBs, and other dangerous chemicals, runs through California’s Imperial Valley, adjacent to crops grown and eaten every day by Americans nationwide. Illegal immigrants have direct contact with this chemical stew, and Border Patrol agents, as a matter of policy, won’t enter the water.
I produced the image component of this project at different access points to the river, collecting water samples along the way. Each image is enclosed in a specimen bottle and suspended in river water taken from the corresponding site. I labeled the bottles with traditional specimen tags, which record thoughts and experiences from police officers, Border Patrol agents, immigrants, hunters, activists, and community leaders. To play with ideas of image construction, I built a reversal of the photographic experience into the work: the viewer looks through the river water to see the photograph, whereas one typically would look at the photograph to see the river.
Tobia Makover
Tobia Makover
Thinking About Photography
Dedicated to expanding our ideas about photography
Robyn Moore
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Bay Twilight)
Being in the Land
Being in the Land is a series of photographic works inspired by my desire to make contact with the memory and intelligence embodied by landscapes. By making aspects of the land’s more latent phenomena visible and material I hope to understand more about its biological capabilities, significance and meaning. I am always chasing ways to give shape to these potencies that haunt me—what seems to me to be the affective power of the land. I rely on my art practice to facilitate empathy and the imagining of others' worlds, lives, histories and experiences and, in so doing, hope for a kind of access to forces and entities otherwise lost or unknown.
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Winter Trees 2)
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Skybridge)
While the full body of work includes archival pigment prints, the works shown here are photopolymer gravure prints. I work with this process because it is unpredictable, giving and revelatory. Indeed, I feel the open, experimental nature of this process allows me to access what cannot be seen with a more conventional sense of sight. The inky sensuousness of photopolymer gravure allows me to explore the viscerally-felt, deeply-imbricated emotional and psychological potencies of what persists in the land: human histories, animal histories, the bodies of deep time and the limits of our own knowledge. By harmonizing the conceptual properties of photography with the material properties of intaglio printmaking I hope the images from Being in the Land might help materialize and amplify this feeling of presence inherent in all landscapes.
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Bay Moonrise)
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Rappahannock)
©Robyn Moore, Being in the Land (Shenandoah)