When I saw this post’s featured image, Camper Landscape, Yosemite National Park, California, in a post on Feature Shoot about the winners of Ken Allen Studios’ spring photo contest (from last June), I knew that artist Daniel Mirer and I had something in common. I love the giant photographic murals covering the camper vehicles you see all over the West these days, and whenever I spot one, I try to line up the image with something in the landscape. I immediately reacted to Mirer’s photo, and visited his website looking for a series of similar images. I was so pleased to find Indifferent West, a project containing more than 70 photographs about the sentimental, cliche, kitsch qualities of representations of the American West.

From the artist’s statement: “Indifferent West” is a photographic and video series that investigates the personification of a North American identity. The American West and its touristic architectural locations are linked to a contemporary landscape as metaphors. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier of the American West. The images are of touristic sites; places that are of the familiar and cliché but also create a picturesque image of an Americana landscape. Through the institutions that perpetuate the mythic models through tourism, the results are that the American West is an idea that has become a vast site for elements of kitsch about a space intersecting with the comic and history ripe for consumption.

These photographs represent private entertainment industries for tourism projecting the notions of the exotification of the romantic, untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes wrapped in mythology attending to what is called the American West. The “West” had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious of the American cultural identity. The western landscape is re-contextualized from reality and is indifferent to historical facts establishing an American psyche of the make-believe, which has become a self-referent notion of ambiguity.

Visit artist's site: danielmirer.com

Early last month, I attended a wonderful talk by the Oregon Historical Society in partnership with the Audubon Society of Portland, “Hunting Birds with a Camera: How William Finley and Herman T. Bohlman Used Photography to Save Oregon’s Birds,” of “On the Road with Finley and Bohlman: Portland.” The presentation was a retrospective on the work of early twentieth century nature photographers William Finley, Irene Finley, and Herman T. Bohlman, whose photographs and tireless dedication to education captivated the public and resulted in the protection of public lands across Oregon and the first laws to protect wild birds in Oregon.

Scaling trees, fording rivers, and braving Oregon’s most rugged landscapes, the team went to almost any lengths to capture Oregon’s birds on film. It was so fun to see not only the incredible wildlife photographs made but images of the photographs in the making, of Finley and Bohlman knee-deep in swamps or high up in trees, and of birds perched in the hands or on the shoulders of the photographers and the people around them. The scenes captured are almost unbelievable; depicted are certainly not the typical situations in which we can find ourselves with birds and animals in America today.

Finley and Bohlman left behind an astounding legacy of natural history photography and writing, land protection, and grassroots advocacy. More than 6,000 photographic images and 8,600 pages of documents – nearly 50 years of work (1899-1946) – are being released online from the collections of the Oregon Historical Society and Oregon State University. The Reuniting Finley and Bohlman collection on the Oregon Historical Society’s Digital Collections website is where the images featured here come from. I have spent hours going through the currently 3,565 (copyright-free, high resolution) images presented there, marveling at all kinds of gorgeous photos of animals in the West. Of course, I am drawn to pictures of dead animals, hunted and presumably found as carcasses and skeletons, but also curious images of humans and animals interacting in amazing, storybook-like ways.

Sources: Oregon Historical Society; Audubon Society of Portland

Like Miska Draskoczy’s work a couple of weeks ago, Mattias Amnäs’s photography had me thinking about my roots in photography. For my first project in a color photography class my sophomore year of college, I created pictures of “color boundaries,” spots that showed divisions in fields of color amongst the urban buildings in my new-to-me city. My images included a lot of fences, walls, telephone lines – and often funny sights in quirky Baltimore, not dissimilar from the geometric hedges and satellite dishes of Amnäs’s series, Scotland.

When Amnäs contacted me, he introduced his pictures from his trip “to the Scottish highlands, Glasgow and Edinburgh, were [he] documented the interaction of sheep, waste, nature and traffic cones.” Based on this text, I had to know more. Amnäs told me, “In early May, I went for a road tip in Scotland. It was my first trip to the UK and I brought my Pentax 6×7 from 1969 on my shoulder, along with 20 rolls of film. I was mesmerized by Scotland’s nature and architecture. Along the roads in Glasgow, you could see a city filled with quick fixes, buildings with facades that hadn’t been cleaned for decades, so much character. Along the roads in the Highlands, you could see all the litter of tourism, sheep everywhere, and the overwhelming usage of traffic cones. Something about it made it feel so surreal, almost like stepping in to a David Lynch film set.”

From the artist’s statement: I’m a graphic designer and photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I like exploring the visual languages of ar­chi­tec­ture, landscape and the interactions between people and their surroundings. I consider myself a documentary photographer rather then a conceptual series photographer. I don’t like to tell the viewer what the photograph is about, I want them to look at it and build their own story.

Visit artist's site: mattiasamnas.com

For college, I moved from my childhood home of suburban Colorado to Baltimore. It was a difficult transition from the wide open west, with natural areas to be easily accessed in every direction, to the center of a large east coast city, where I could only walk and take the light rail in attempt to interact with nature and animals anywhere I could. I adjusted by making photographs of my new surroundings, square, sans-people, and often of evidence of nature in the city. I thought about those pictures a lot while I was viewing Miska Draskoczy’s series Gowanus Wild. The photos are all made at night, the odd lighting and colors adding to the images’ bizarre subjects: a hanging plant mounted high on the brick wall of a parking lot; a huge tree surrounded by trash, graffiti, and glowing city lights.

From the artist’s statement: My vision for “Gowanus Wild” is to illustrate a personal exploration of nature and wilderness in the paradoxical setting of a contaminated industrial environment. As the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn has been declared a federal Superfund cleanup site and seen over 150 years of continuous industrial use, one of my aims with the series is to show just how tenacious nature can be in the face of such grave environmental destruction. Set entirely at night when the area empties of people and activity, the mood is one of stillness, reflection, and discovery.

I’ve lived on the border of Gowanus and Park Slope since 2008, and walking home through the deserted streets, I was always struck by how odd and atmospheric the place felt. At first I photographed the area because it inspired interesting images. Later I started to ask myself more consciously what it was that drew me to it. While an indictment of man’s abuse of the environment is perhaps inevitable, my goal is to not just celebrate nature’s resilience but to also show how it is paralleled by the human ability to seek and find the balm of nature in the most unlikely of places. I believe wilderness and adventure are natural longings and that satisfying these urges is perhaps less about far flung travel and more about altering our perception and awakening to our surroundings, however ugly or distraught they may be.

Gowanus Wild has been made into a book, which can be ordered here.

Visit artist's site: miskadraskoczy.com

Several years ago, when I was first starting to photograph in natural history museums, I was experimenting with abstracting taxidermy animals and focusing on the fields of color behind them in their display cases. It was within a year that I stumbled upon Grounded by Helen Sear – and promptly quit my project because I was so blown away by the pictures she had made in a similar vein. Grounded has always stuck with me, and I thought of it instantly when I saw some prints of new-to-me work by Lee Deigaard at the Living With Animals conference. I had featured Lee’s work a few years ago, and I was so excited when I learned she’d be at the conference. I love the photographs in her series Equuleus (“part of a multi-media long-term project, In Your Dreams [Horses], exploring horse personality and individuality, sensory processing and proprioception, concepts of invitation, initiation, and trespass, and shared thresholds of experience between horse and human”) for the same reasons I am drawn to Sear’s work – the playful concept; the surreal, otherworldly quality – but also for its thoughtful, poetic statement. Boundaries, the horizon, the symbolism of the horse’s back – knowing the meaning of these images to the artist makes me wholly appreciate this project.

From the artist’s statement:
Boundaries – between earth and sky, between species, between bodies in space also exist between incursion and permission, coercion and compliance, between inside and out. Boundaries define concepts of self and other and are often flexible and permeable.
The horizon – that place of possibility – when pursued as a destination always eludes us.
Horses, as they did throughout human history from the third millennium B.C. took us there. The horse’s back in these photographs embodies the horizon; his back carries his rider farther than the rider could walk alone.
Where bodies are in space, within the landscape, can define the parameters of a relationship from formal to intimate. To cross another’s boundaries i.e. to touch them, carries a charge – whether of transgression or connection depends on the context.
Human exploration, whether global or granular, invokes conquest.
The body is a landscape. One body in connection with another body is a relationship.
Human-equine relationships derive from ingrained predator-prey relationships, (im)balances of power (physical and otherwise), and concepts of dependence and interdependence, compliance and autonomy. These are foundational aspects to almost any interpersonal relationship. Knowing a horse is like being in any partnership. Touch, proximity, familiarity, request, response mediate how we interact in close quarters. Acts of grooming and riding are by definition intimate; they involve close contact, communicative touch (and being touched), and mutual cooperation.
Horses naturally attune themselves – to our heartbeats, rates of breathing, the movements of our pupils – they are sensitive to pheromones. The know the subtle language of the body. It is difficult to hide your true self from a horse. He reads you, perhaps better than you do yourself.
A horse – no matter how big or brave – thinks and reacts like a prey animal. He scans the horizon and takes the long view: the movements of sun and stars, the change of seasons, the grass as it grows. He can see very nearly in the round. He is alert to the landscape, his pupils, rectangular and horizontal, are geared towards the horizon and the approach of any distant predator. The feeling of close connection in an intimate relationship also carries a sense of deep strangeness and far places. To know and be known is a wide open frontier.

Visit artist's site: leedeigaard.com