ultrachrome inkjet print
18 x 9 inches
2012
Apocalyptic vision ultimately hinges on uncertainty. What can be more exciting than imagining the unknown? The moment of death is a culturally loaded image; we expect our lives to flash before our eyes, compressing years of experience into a single instant. As technologies and environmental upheaval develop explosively around us, the ever-accelerating change of the Earth’s surface and systems seems palpably analogous to the moment of death on a geologic time scale. This could be The End.
Abyss connects the life of a digital camera – a machine whose purpose is to see and remember – to the human spirit. This is a photograph of Crater Lake (fittingly, a site formed in a massive volcanic eruption that devastated life for hundreds of miles around), made at the exact moment the camera died. The last traces of its vision are as distorted as they are beautiful.