Afterlife reimagines the landscape through the lens of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose poetic empiricism shaped our earliest understanding of ecological interdependence. In this project, I construct a semi-fictional world populated by altered landscape artifacts—rocks, flora, fragments of terrain—and Humboldt-like figures who navigate and measure an otherworldly environment. The title refers to a newly revived state of our exhausted planet, transformed and reconsidered in-camera.
Today’s environment bears little resemblance to the one Humboldt encountered. Nearly every surface has been seen, surveyed, or reshaped by human activity. We are living in a new epoch marked by nuclear residue, fossil-fuel combustion, plastic sediments, and mass extinction—echoes of the very systems Humboldt first diagrammed. As unspoiled environments vanish, nature itself has become obscene—overexposed, hyper-mediated, and flattened into Instagram tropes. This work emerged from my desire to see the landscape anew, to imagine what it might feel like to encounter the earth with Humboldt’s sense of discovery while acknowledging its present fragility.
The notion of nature as something separate from us is a myth—one intensified by our domination and commodification of it. In reality, “nature” is an idea we continually construct. These photographs argue that to have an authentic relationship with the natural world requires acts of creation. The images operate through collaborative interventions: performative acts of lighting and color that remake the terrain as a way of honoring it.
What would it mean to see the earth as if for the first time—after it has been photographed, exploited, and degraded? Afterlife reflects a world caught between the Sublime—vast, chaotic, beyond our control—and the obscene—clichéd and simulated. It asks how wonder might be rekindled in a landscape that is at once depleted and continually remade.
Humboldt suggested that nature is like a tapestry that could be undone with the pull of a thread. The thread has been pulled. Yet here we are, enduring. As in Afterlife, we shape the future by viewing the present through the eyes of the past.
