Sunrise on Mesquite Flat Dunes, Death Valley, California. 2013.
“In the last decade, I’ve traveled and photographed extensively throughout the Western National Forests and National Parks. In doin
(...) g so, I’ve revisited famous Western landscapes seen in the historic photographs of Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams. I discovered that many of these iconic landscapes—so crucial to our collective understanding of the American West—were deteriorating, affected by human interference. The pictures I took, which began as an homage to the legacy of grand Western landscape photography, evolved into an opportunity to build on it.
Like my forebears, I use an 8-by-10-inch large-format film camera, which allows for an unrivaled level of detail. However, when printing this series, I’m not interested in depicting the way the landscape appears in reality, but rather in its potential for emotional resonance. For me, color is a conduit to making those feelings visible, beginning a radical, queer new chapter to the otherwise colonial, heteronormative history of the medium.”
- David Benjamin Sherry
Copyright © David Benjamin Sherry
