3rd Place winner
Salt Flats, Utah 2025
DESCRIPTION
This photograph shows a mirrored prism placed within the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The site is known for its extreme horizontality, where land and sky collapse into a continuous field. The prism interrupts this expanse, reflecting fragments of the surrounding terrain and atmosphere while concealing them at the same time.The object does not aim to blend into the setting but to alter its perception. By fracturing the horizon into planes of light and shadow, it reorders the scale and geometry of the scene. The Salt Flats, formed over millennia through cycles of water and evaporation, are a landscape that is both fragile and enduring. The prism responds to this condition with its own temporary presence, creating an encounter between permanence and ephemerality.
The photograph is part of Temporary Structures (The Illumination Project), a series exploring how prisms placed in charged environments shift our experience of place. Here, the Salt Flats are both the subject and the medium, transformed through a precise intervention that highlights the instability of vision and the ways in which environment is reframed through reflection.
AUTHOR
Paul Costello is a photographer from San Francisco, now based in New Orleans. He received a BFA in Photography from New York University and has worked professionally for more than two decades across editorial, commercial, and fine art contexts. His career spans commissioned work for major publications and brands alongside a personal practice focused on large-scale, site-driven photographic work. His current project, Temporary Structures (The Illumination Project), stages mirrored and luminous prisms in landscapes where fragility and beauty intersect. These temporary forms act as interventions that refract light, fold terrain back onto itself, and reframe the viewer’s experience of place. Drawing on the traditions of land art, minimalism, and site-specific installation, Costello situates his practice firmly within photography, producing images that question how human presence, however fleeting, reshapes the landscape. He has exhibited in galleries across the United States and continues to expand the scope of his work internationally. 