LandEscape Art Review // Special Issue | Page 56

Land scape
Stephen Chen
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
I could not figure out how I could represent these moments such that people “ got it ” - they just looked like “ bad ” photos .
At around the same time , I began experimenting with false-color infrared photography , mainly because I had an unused digital camera lying around that I could convert . I never felt an affinity to digital photography before because I loved the element of chance in darkroom work – you never quite know how your pictures are going to turn out . You could control all the variables to get consistent results , but that would take away the fun of discovery and happy “ accidents ”. I liked that what was displayed on the screen in digital infrared did not represent the outcome when you process the image on the computer ( by making “ visible ” the channel the infrared data was captured on ). I also could not pre-visualize the image ( like in film or digital photography ) as my eyes could not see the levels of infrared light reflected off different objects , which introduced another element of chance in imagemaking .
The idea for BOUNDED NATURE came about when I was thinking of how to push infrared photography beyond the tropes of white trees and dark skies . I realized that certain images in my abandoned project would work in falsecolor infrared , that dandelion would “ pop ” from the sidewalk crack without having to sacrifice compositional context . This started me thinking on how we are taught to see and visualize the world through the tropes of photography . Nature in landscape photographs is grand , heroic , and exotic ; and is largely invisible in urban photography . I saw this as a metaphor for urban dwellers ’ cultivated unconscious on our larger environmental impacts - where the idea of Nature only exists in an idealized form but is suppressed in the day to day .