Senior Reading Response # 5

1.) Kristen Hoving: Working Stone

I really enjoyed Kristen Hoving’s series on the rock quarries of Vermont. She documents the mining of limestone deposits, an old practice that has expanded over centuries. I love how she plays with scale, dwarfing tractors and large machinery with massive shelves of stone to make a point about the dynamics between man and nature. The most dominant feature in the images is almost always the ancient rock looming over the comparably flimsy manmade tools, but at the same time, the great scars in the landscape and missing chunks of rock are a reminder of the power of humans over the environment.

I thought this series was a good example of deep exploration into a topic. I feel I’ve seen some diverse views of the documented subject, yet the images are cohesive as a series. To me the photos speak about the complex relationship and history between man and wild. I love that they also present a kind of beautiful destruction that verges on the grotesque, as the earth is broken into with a methodical violence that is a bit disturbing, and yet visually pleasing.

2.) Tracy N. Freeman: Quiet Revels

I liked the main idea of this series, but it left me a little unsatisfied. I love Freeman’s abstraction of natural elements into ambiguous shapes, colors, and textures. Some of them reminded me of Kristen’s vertical landscape photos because they have a similar zen-like quiet about them, while also putting the viewer off a little by distorting or masking the actual space. However, I felt like the idea could be explored more. The series felt a little bit repetitive to me, which might have been helped by a greater variety in different angles, light qualities, distances, or approaches to the material.

3.) Jane Fulton Alt: The Burn

This series caught my attention because I’ve been working with smoke myself. Jane Fulton Alt photographs controlled prairie fires, making pictures of burning vegetation and landscapes obscured by smoke. The themes of life and death and the idea of liminal and changing space in this series are some things I’ve been thinking about with my images as well. It’s interesting to see how someone else handles the material of smoke, and it definitely inspires me to continue experimenting.

The color palette is really stunning, mostly cloudy gray and monotone with pops of angry yellow and orange flame. I love her use of the square format, but the few long horizontal pieces are particularly striking in their sense of motion; the rectangles feel more open ended and cinematic than the squares, which, although they also play with space within their frames, seem like more self-contained compositions.