When Adams took his photographs, global warming was not something that anyone was thinking about, though he was certainly aware of the need to preserve wild lands in the face of expanding industrialization and the privatization of land for ranches and farming. He would have been horrified to think that we could destroy the climate and atmosphere, and the concept of the planet becoming uninhabitable for most of what we recognize as “nature” would have been inconceivable.  His photographs evoke a feeling of permanence, as if the mountains, trees and water he depicts will never change; even the light in his images has a fixed quality, excruciatingly beautiful, and frozen in time. In the context of what we now call ‘global warming’ this aspect of his work seems strange, almost supernatural.  As our government chips away at even land reserved “eternally for posterity,” more than ever it is important to recognize the things that exist in protected parks and few remaining truly wild places we all enjoy.  This series reflects my visual relationship with Adams, and my thoughts about the land his work champions. 

Recently, it is in the polar regions that we see the most devastation. I am in debt to, of all things, the Amazon Prime series Fortitude (which takes fortitude to watch, I must add) for its stark images of the ice of the far north and dark message about what happens when prehistorically frozen entities begin to thaw.  I watched it obsessively for days, freezing the frame to sketch the cracks and fissures in ice, and the blacks and whites of the relentless, white, frozen landscape it depicts. The series is violent and disturbing, and I was forced to watch it to get to the images that fascinated me. Soon I found myself troubled at night by dark dreams which dealt with destruction, linked with the terror I feel at the natural disaster we are already experiencing as more and more species become extinct. 

So far, mountains, trees and lakes persist. The clouds are still in the sky, and nature is still spectacular, though often so much a part of us we do not notice it.  We will when it is gone. These prints are my attempt to make permanent some of what I no longer take for granted. Their monochromatic nature, though, puts them in the same realm as sepia photographs of things long in the past.  

- Laura Clark