Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.
Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.
Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.
Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.
The narcissism of wedding photographers
The problem is that photographs don’t just record reality — they change it. Quantum physicists talk of the observer effect: the very act of observing reality causes a disturbance within it, and thus changes it. Something similar is true of wedding photography. We pose for photographs. We behave differently when we are being captured on film. We may feel awkward or self-conscious; we may pout or posture. In extreme cases, reality is bent around the presence of the photographic: lighting is enhanced, people are asked to stand in different places and look in different ways. Reality becomes a stage set.