Captured Earth

How can the natural world be represented in ways that elude the relentless objectification of classical tropes? This is perhaps the most challenging proposition entailed by Captured Earth, the show that Kristin Taylor has expertly and imaginatively curated. The selection of work, drawn from the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s collection, establishes a dialogue among a broad range of practices and approaches, all of which, in one way or another, aim at bridging the documentaristic distance that has often characterized the idiom of the photographic medium. 

It is therefore perhaps not a surprise that indexicalities of all kinds and manners should play a big role here — the material essence of photography is pushed to the fore, and sometimes to the limit, to unleash expressive potential well beyond the glossiness of traditional prints. An overall sense of healthy disregard for the purity and pristineness of the medium brightly shines through. At times, as in Jeremy Bolen’s haunting images, rolls of photographic film have spent months buried underground near the banks of the contaminated Fox River before they re-emerge transfigured as indexical maps of anthropogenic corruptions; at others, as in the stitched-together cyanotype photograms by Dakota Mace, it is the ephemeral nature of ancestral memory to become poetically inscribed in the traces of branches, rocks, and rain.