Grant Mudford's #photographs of the #American #landscape have captured my attention today. These images illustrate the residue of human intervention on the land. In some ways its as if the native landscape ceases to exist. If there's nature in the photo at all, it's relegated to the margins and the background.

These images aren’t joyous — I get a sense of melancholy, maybe a touch of nihilism. I think the symmetry and geometric formal qualities in these three photographs enhance those feelings. The artifacts depicted in these landscapes are monumental, almost bigger than life, but they seem deserted, unloved, left behind.

I always say that people are like rats. We populate a space and make huge messes; in a way we’re nesting I guess. Then, when the mess becomes intolerable, we move on to someplace else. Now that we’ve pretty-much taken over any habitable place on the planet (and some uninhabitable ones too), we don’t have anywhere else to go. What happens now? I don’t know.