YPOQ

I am repeatedly drawn to the exuberant, otherworldly landscape of South San Francisco Bay. There, depending on the mood of a Sunday, I can bring binoculars to bear on the still abundant wildlife, explore diverse halophilic microorganisms with a field microscope, hike out to ponder early engineering interventions scattered across the Bay shallows, or (my favorite) launch a kite-lofted camera to photograph juxtapositions in the landscape from above. And juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions.

Over time my idle curiosity has become a sustained fascination. For behind the visual richness of these juxtapositions lie the South Bay’s interesting history and the active formulation, at this very moment, of bold initiatives for its future. For five years I have taken low-level aerial photographs over the South Bay salt ponds using cameras lofted by kites. That these images are often visually compelling is in no small part because they reveal remnants of an enigmatic past. It turns out that aerial images greatly reduce sky reflection from the salt pond surfaces thus exposing colors, textures and information hidden from normal points of view. Furthermore, the views contain elements from a variety of historic layers as though layers of tracing paper on an architect’s desk.

The set contains images from my colors & textures thread as well as the salt pond ruins thread.

24 photos | 767 views

items are from between 29 May 2005 & 11 May 2008.