Phototerragrams: organic and photo-chemical collaborations with the earth

Conventions and traditional approaches to landscape depiction and documentation have long been problematized by engaging in the process of “pictorialization” (as theorized by Gina Crandell in Nature Pictorialized: "The View" in Landscape History). Crandell’s theory suggests a culturally maintained construction of an idealized, benevolent, passive and ultimately disempowered nature—through the landscape’s objectification by the ‘human as spectator, nature as spectacle’ dynamic. (Czerniak, 1997) The Phototerragram practice seeks to subvert traditional landscape photography by relinquishing partial control of the image production back to the land itself. Rather than objectifying and pictorializing the landscape this photo-chemical process seeks collaboration and engagement with it. By selecting and capturing a given piece of earth, exposing on a film negative, and then burying that negative in the very ground itself, the landscape takes an active role, rather than the traditional passive role. During the negative’s burial its undergoes organic decomposition; its interaction with microorganisms—and its literal soiling—are captured on the film. Phototerragrams then, do not pictorialize and objectify the environment, but participate with it, encouraging the perception of the landscape as a dynamic and autonomous actor.