3rd Place winner
Pollution (The Coming Jurassic)
DESCRIPTION
Castaic Creek, from the Sierra Pelona towards Castaic Lake, 2024.Canon 6D Mark II, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, no generative tools.
Driving the highways of SoCal, you often see something plastic on the roadside. Not always a deck chair, which at the time of this photo was somewhere to the left of frame, but maybe a wrapper or the lid off a soda cup.
It’s been done to death that plastic will outlive us all, but when you’re in a mountain range that’s several hundred million years old, that token reminder of our recent impact on the planet seems small if only because the planet itself is ancient, powerful, and even frightening in its modalities. It is volcanic, organic, metallic, tectonic, magnetic, and atmospheric, and the consequences of human-accelerated climate change are terrifying to think about.
I wanted to capture that precarious feeling in an image, and at the same time capture the slow burn that has marked extinction events in geological time. And of the five great extinctions of the Phanerozoic, the end-Triassic event is the most prescient and therefore human. A phantasmagoria of both long-simmering and sudden changes in the Earth's climate, rapid regional mass extinctions and global declines. Sounds familiar, right?
An inevitably warmer climate faces us, just like at the advance of the Jurassic 200 million years ago. But will humanity’s path mirror the dinosaurs — will we thrive in this new world?
AUTHOR
The short:Born in Houston, TX, 1996.
Based between Los Angeles and London.
Self-taught, so I joke that I only recently moved from out of focus to in focus.
By profession, I’m a proposal writer who’s been on sabbatical since 2024.
The long:
I'm a Houstonian who fell in love with photography late (relative) and madly. Before, I’d never given it thought beyond mucking around with the family camera on occasion. But in the afterglow of a decade where I fell out of love with music, and every other creative outlet, photography came upon me like a close encounter of the first, second, then third kind. At first it was routine, me noticing the camera there on the shelf more often, then conceptual when on a whim I bought Ansel Adam’s “The Camera” one winter. Within it, I found proof of the sensory dimension within photography: that silt, sun, water, wind, and rock can be made tactile through composition and a lot of skill in the darkroom. What technique in any creative discipline allows is a chance to express feeling; it’s a journey towards oneself. The more you try, the more you discover what works for your own art. But the close encounter of the third kind is contact with the alien, and for me the gravity of photography became real through bad execution, and a lot of it. I got a camera of my own and the first three thousand images I took were exclusively dreck. They are also exclusively soulful: within them is the cosmos I’m still exploring, studies and artefacts of saturation and exposure and focus. They are the images where I fell in love with the form.
