Aesthetics of Annihilation: Visualising the Anthropocene in the American West
2025-26
Ansel Adams Research Fellowship
Commissioned by the Centre for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
This project critcally engages with the Ansel Adams Archive to examine links between photographic aesthetics and landscape destruction. The project traces Ansel Adams’ historical reliance on toxic heavy metals, used to enhance photographic clarity and tonal control.
It engages critically with Adams’ landscape conservationist work - examining how photography is materially complicit in the production of polluted landscapes that it seeks to defend. This intervention reframes photographic aesthetics as a question of chemical violence rather than composition and form.
The project transforms heavy-metal remediating into plant-based photo-chemistries; these are used to reprint Adam’s iconic Yosemite landscapes. The prints are embossed with the chemical names of toxic elements to produce Adams’ original prints. The project
engages critically with Adams’ landscape conservationist work, examining how photography is materially complicit in the production of polluted landscapes that it seeks to defend. It reframes photographic aesthetics as a question concerning chemical violence rather than composition and form.
The work forms part of a broader engagement with photography’s violent history in imaging and shaping the American West.
It thinks critically about photography’s operationalisation in landscape control - first to map and extract the region, and later to defend it through conservationist photography led by practitioners like Ansel Adams.