Photography by David Ondrik

Ideas

These images are a search for the sublime within my environment. Generally the sublime is imagined to be an unsullied Nature, picturesque scenes (with no signs of human activity and impact) where we are dwarfed by the awesomeness of the natural world. But to paraphrase Victor Hugo, the sublime is a combination of the grotesque and the beautiful. My treatment of landscape relies on this idea. Destructive signs of modernity – forest fires, discarded tires, jetty jacks, places abandoned – are my vision of the sublime. In New Mexico, environmental nuisances are embedded everywhere in the traditionally beautiful landscape. In artistic expressions of the Sublime from the 19th century, man is small, in awe of and overwhelmed by the purity and enormity of Nature. The sublime in the 21st century has “transcended” this. It is no longer possible for man to be in a Romantic fog, far removed from the muck. I am no longer awe struck by the great vastness of untouched wilderness, were it even possible to find such a place. I am instead awestruck standing on the precipice above a drought-stricken reservoir, a superfund site, an (utterly avoidable) forest fire. These consequences of modernity are what make me feel small and powerless.

In today's color-saturated world of contemporary photography, shooting in black and white is a conscious effort to strip a layer of information (color) from the imagery. With the color removed, the images take on a more poetic interpretation.