After completing Skins, a portrait series of people in their work attire, advertising and industrial photographer Miguel Vallinas pondered ways to capture the different sides of human nature. One day, hanging out with his dog Leo, Vallinas had the idea to capture his pet’s human side by compositing it with a self-portrait, giving birth to his next series, Second Skins.

“The idea is, ‘If you were a rabbit, what would you wear? How would you pose?’” posits Vallinas. Forty or so composites later, he had created personalities ranging from the average pigeon to exotic beasts.

The Spanish photographer’s initial subjects included both live animals, scouted and photographed from farms in the local countryside, and taxidermied animal heads belonging to private owners or the University of Vallodalid’s collection. After photographing these on location, Vallinas would go back to the studio and choose a suitable outfit for each animal. He photographed either his wife Leticia or a friend wearing the clothes, then composited the two images together.

To get an accurate composite, all of the technical details of the two photos had to match, which took a lot of trial-and-error. He photographed both the animals and the humans with a Canon EOS 5D and 24–105mm f/4L Canon EF lens. He used sunlight on farms and a single side light and reflector to soften shadows when shooting taxidermied subjects indoors.

Vallinas also kept the lighting simple in the studio, using only a single strobe and reflector. Positioning these and his tripod-mounted camera proved trickier, and he always had to refer to the initial animal photo. “Finding the angle and distance is the hardest part,” he says. First he’d set the correct tripod height, then adjust placement of the equipment. The model’s pose also needed to suit the angle of the animal’s head.

The photographer also did a lot of finessing in Adobe Photoshop CS6, mainly to line up the animal and the neckline. “Reproducing the shadows between the clothing and the animal skin is the most delicate part,” Vallinas says.

He is happy with the results: “It shows possible personalities not available to us humans.”

Miguel Vallinas is based in Medina del Campo, Spain. See more work at www.miguelvallinas.com.

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William Rugen has seen nature up closer than most—before transitioning into a photography career in 2005, he worked for nearly 20 years as a fisheries biologist. But his New Botanicals series was the Seattle-based pro’s first foray into plant life, inspired partly by his interest in the graphic quality of flowers and leaves as well as his lifelong interest in scientific prints. His inclusion in a 2009 group show prodded him to make new work and jump-started the project.

“There’s something about seeing a plant out of its context that really shows its life,” says Rugen, who works full-time for Motofish Images. And seeing the roots, he adds, “shows you that there is a bit of ugliness needed to create anything of value.”

His first subject, a daffodil—which has a relatively clean bulb—gave him “an unrealistic view of how long the process can take,” he jokes. Most plants are much more difficult to prep. After hunting a subject out at a nursery, it can take him up to an hour to wash and prune roots that may be fragile—such as a heliotrope and a bleeding heart—or tangled, in the case of a shrub.

From there, he has about an hour to shoot before his subject wilts, no easy feat with his setup. To create a “floating look,” he usually suspends these in front of colored backdrops using a Manfrotto Magic Arm, Super Clamps, and a fondue fork. He occasionally positions and reattaches leaves and stems with fishing wire. Rugen uses a mix of Profoto and Comet lights, along with foam-core for bounced fill, which usually requires some fussing. If the plant survives being planted afterwards in his garden, he adds, “it was a success.”

Masking in Adobe Photoshop can take from 10 to 12 hours. But after seeing his first four prints on the gallery wall, Rugen was hooked. He has since continued the series and is now working with some local specialists on a new goal: capturing a small tree. Suspending plants, Rugen says, puts their above-ground elements into better proportion—typical garden views pay more attention to the flowers than the leaves. More importantly, seeing the roots, he says, “reminds you that its crazy tangle of material makes the complex plant you see.”

William Rugen is a commerical and fine-art photographer. See more at williamrugen.com.

New zealand flax

Hellebore

Alberta spruce

Spurge

Ranunculus

Bleeding heart

Daffodil

Dahlia

Heliotrope

Dusty miller

Barberry

Calla lily

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The most magical part of childhood is the ability to live in the imagination. Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City–based Rachel Hulin often draws on her early fantasies of levitation for her editorial and commercial photography. But the inspiration for her new children’s book, Flying Henry (powerHouse Books, 2013), came mostly from her son. In 2011, Henry, then 6 months old, loved being held aloft and sailed around the room. After photographing this a few times, Hulin was struck by how much it appeared as if he were caught in his own experience, floating apart. “It was an allegory for how he seemed so in his own world,” she explains. “I was always trying to figure out what was going on in his mind.”

She began staging shoots of Henry in flight, using a tripod and self-timer as she (and occasionally, her husband, David) held him. The photo sessions usually took 10 minutes, netting five shots of the background and five of Henry before he lost interest. She composited the images and erased the adults in Adobe Photoshop. Encouraged by positive responses from friends and colleagues on Facebook, she pitched the photos as a children’s book. But crafting a storyline was tough going for Hulin. “I knew where Henry’s adventure started—in the home—but I wasn’t sure where it would end,” she says. After making images at home, she devised trips to a topiary garden and a zoo during a Halloween festival: life for a floating baby truly in the outside world. The book’s conclusion—Henry realizes that the world is much more fun to explore with friends—was captured with the help of the smaller guests at David’s 35th birthday party.

The image here was taken in David’s parents’ kitchen when Henry was about 10 months old. “It’s a solitary, quiet moment—the light when it comes in during the afternoon is beautiful,” Hulin says. “This is the moment where nothing in the kitchen is quite within his reach. It’s when he decides to fly off and have all of these adventures.”

From Flying Henry by Rachel Hulin, published by powerHouse Books.

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Man Smoking Cigarette in Bare Living Room

As long and intensive as many personal projects tend to be, Marc Asnin’s Uncle Charlie surpasses most. The 30-year investigation into his uncle Charlie Henschke’s chaotic life started in 1981, when Asnin began photographing him for a student project.

Now more than 200 images (culled from thousands) are intertwined with interviews compiled from hundreds of transcripts and presented in short-story (really, prose-poem) form. The document encompasses Charlie’s life at his home at 23 Troutman Street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where he played a significant part in street life and drug culture as far back as 1969 and dealt with personal tragedies such as the loss of his middle son, Joe, from AIDS in 1996.

A father of five and Asnin’s godfather, Uncle Charlie had originally been a figure of strength to the photographer—but the work revealed a much more complicated personality, one who struggled with emotional and mental health issues, a history of substance abuse and often-conflicted relationships with his neighbors.

The photo above was taken on Charlie’s moving day in 2000 after being forced into public housing following his eviction from Troutman Street.

Though he’d frequently talked about relocating, “this was a big issue in learning to adapt to a new identity,” Asnin says, “because it was leaving memory and history behind.”

The conflict of identity—how one’s self-perception changes through circumstances, oftentimes sudden and dramatic—underlies most of the long history in Uncle Charlie, as well as the ways in which his uncle receives the work today. Sometimes, Asnin says, “he tells me I’ll go to hell for this, but he takes pride in it. He says, ‘These are my words, this is my genius.’”

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Many photographers would see Claire Oring’s early career as something of a fairy tale. She had been out of school for about six weeks—having taken one photography class while earning her bachelor’s degree in 3-D animation from Otis College of Art and Design—when she landed an assignment to create a travel diary across Israel and the Czech Republic for the Urban Outfitters blog. In the two years since, this Los Angeles–based pro, now 24, has continued to photo-blog for UO and begun to sell canvas art prints in its stores. She’s also built a fashion portfolio with clients including Billabong, Vans, and Jeffrey Campbell.

“I feel very lucky,” Oring says, noting that the offer UO e-mailed her had gone to her spam folder—back then her website was so new that a retail giant was the last client she expected to hear from. Oring’s early success really stems from her fine-tuned aesthetic and drive for storytelling, which she has nurtured since age 11, when she won a travel-photo competition in her home state of California and received a 35mm Canon EOS Rebel 2000 from her parents. Inspired by myths and fairy tales, she played with such iconography throughout high school. Her first major conceptual shoot, made the summer before college, used multiple models, styling, and “girls floating in water.”

Studying over the following three years what she calls “Pixar-style animation” techniques and continuing to photograph on the side, Oring grew tired of computers. “I prefer to be out collaborating with people,” she says. During her senior year, photo professor Siri Kaur encouraged her to build a creative portfolio; she followed the advice, and her website was highly concept-driven and fashion-focused by the time she posted it online in 2011.

Oring credits her school background with developing a style that syncs across commercial and personal work. For the latter, she prefers to shoot with film: “Every type of film and every camera has its own look, and each combination gives you a distinct mood,” she says. Creating short videos gave her experience in building up a narrative while planning wardrobes and lighting, styling, and building sets. Oring brings all this work to bear in her digital projects for clients. The night before a typical shoot, she’s up late storyboarding and making lists. “I decide on location, wardrobe, hair, makeup, special effects, time of day, story, props,” she says, adding that she draws on an arsenal of models and muses. “It’s all about bringing imagination into reality.”

Oring uses her personal projects to further blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Her apartment is packed with potential props she finds at flea markets; she carries wardrobes and accessories in her car trunk for impromptu shoots. Online, she researches fantastical locations for concepts like Snow White- or Ophelia-themed projects. She’s plotted road trips with friends to Death Valley along her own story lines: “I could easily imagine a bunch of goth Valley Girls running that place,” Oring says, adding that the results from this approach won Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n (10 winners, 10 films) contest in the Unknown category in 2012.

On a recent trip to Europe with her mother and sister, Oring discovered megalithic rock formations on the isles of Skye and Lewis in Scotland, and within a day she’d booked a tour with a local archaeologist. She created a series about a young girl (played by her sister) making a pilgrimage at the summer solstice; the archaeologist, she says, “thought we were a bunch of California hippies.”

The merging of work and play is the reason that Oring rarely stops doing either. Yet she calls her most recent photographs “more critical and contemplative.” Another new experiment: shooting male models for the first time. These, she says, “are a whole different story.”

ClaireOring.com

Lives In: Los Angeles, CA

Studied At: Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; University of Westminster, London

Clients Include: BCBGeneration, Billabong, Brandy Melville, Jeffrey Campbell, Modcloth, Urban Outfitters, Vans, You Me & Charlie

Exhibitions: Up Collective SXSW Showcase, Austin, TX, 2012; Underage by Featured Shoot at Photoville, New York City, 2012; Lomography’s Diana World Tour, 2012

In the Bag: For commercial work: Canon EOS 5D Mark III; Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens. For personal work: vintage Polaroid Spectra; 35mm Contax and Pentax cameras; Rolleiflex Automat; Diana F+. New Tools: RadLab editing program for hyper-saturated images; Marshall’s Master Photo Oils for hand-tinting prints.

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When Parisian photographer Laurent Chehere first began shooting some of the buildings in his city’s less-privileged outlying neighborhoods in 2007, he hoped to “show their hidden beauty,” he says, “by getting them out from the anonymity of the streets.” He did this in the most literal way possible, with the creation of his series Flying Houses.

The commercial pro, now 41, didn’t want to just displace these buildings physically. “I wanted to help them tell their stories, real or not, funny or sad,” he explains.

So after photographing them, he began weaving fantastic narratives for the buildings using Adobe Photoshop, often inspired by the plots of films: ranging from childrens’ classics such as Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, to art-house favorites by the likes of Marcel Carné, Federico Fellini, and Wim Wenders.

The idea for each image was inspired just as much by the character (and people) of the neighborhoods, including urban Parisian districts Ménilmontant and Belleville, as well as quieter residential areas, with casts of characters ranging from gypsy caravans to circus clowns, and buildings that might be “an old erotic cinema in Pigalle, a small neighborhood café, or a pretty little house in a boring suburb.”

After shooting hundreds of images with his Canon EOS 5D Mark II—typically in the same area in the same light, he would sit down to make his careful composites. Incorporating the buildings against their background skies as well as dozens of collected added details—graffiti, assorted windows, flying birds, and phone cables for each building’s “tether.”

Some may be recognizable as direct cinematic references; “Red Balloon,” for example, and “Circus,” which pays tribute to Fellini’s La Strada_. Others are more about the neighborhood: One portrays the often dangerous passage undertaken by Paris’ immigrant population as_ a “far-from-charming Noah’s Ark.”

With 18 photos in the series completed, Chehere is now in the process of compositing an added 20 for a book that will be published next year; he also has a show opening November 1 at New York City’s Muriel Guépin Gallery.

Chehere says the works are as much about the imagination of the viewer as his own. “In the end, everyone makes their own stories of the Flying Houses.”

Laurent Chehere is commercial and fine-art photographer based in Paris. See more at [laurentchehere.com](http://laurent/ chehere.com).

The Cinema

For Sale

Circus

Caravan

Linen Which Dries

The Great Illusion

The Voyeur

Fire

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Brandon Thibodeaux had a more than glancing understanding of the Mississippi Delta’s complicated history when he began photographing it. He grew up in a nearby part of Texas, and as a journalism student at the University of North Texas in 2006 he focused on agricultural economies. But he didn’t travel there until 2009. And though by then he was a freelance photographer, he’d come simply to escape Dallas for a while. “In one way I was looking to apply my knowledge from school,” he says. “But that aside, the Delta was the quietest place I could think of to ride my bike, meet people, and do what I did on a daily basis back home.”

Then a new acquaintance invited him to Sunday lunch at the home of the Coffey family in the town of Duncan. This became the crux of a long-term photography project and sparked what Thibodeaux now considers some of his most important relationships. The Coffeys are well known throughout the neighboring towns, and Thibodeaux found them incredibly warm and welcoming in a way that he hadn’t yet experienced much in Dallas. “Their candidness, and their openness for me to be there, like I was part of the family, was almost astonishingly immediate,” he says. “At that particular time, it was incredibly meaningful to me.”

Over that lunch and the ones that followed, the photographer opened up in conversations about music, religion, and relationships. He became a sort of confidant even as he remained an outsider to the community. He photographed the family the day they met, and his camera has since come along on many Sunday lunches, during which the Coffeys have introduced him to friends. As he turned this growing portfolio into a longer documentary project, mentioning the Coffey name helped him meet strangers in towns such as Alligator and Bo Bo.

The resulting series, When the Morning Comes, took root over four years; he is now developing it into a book. He hopes that by introducing the faces and names of those who live in the Delta’s agricultural towns—human lives, rather than mere demographics—he might highlight their economic ordeals. Most of all, his work is a tribute to the years Thibodeaux has spent talking with strangers who, when he needed it, welcomed him in.

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During a year in Bozeman, Montana, Bryan Schutmaat, now based in Brooklyn, New York, became fascinated by the nearby mining town of Butte; he has captured the area on and off throughout the six years since. His Grays the Mountain Sends, begun in late 2010, was influenced by literature set in the region by Richard Ford, William Kittredge, Raymond Carver, and especially poet Richard Hugo. “Hugo’s poems were often inspired by real-life towns he called ‘triggering towns,’ and so I began visiting them, searching for material just as he did,” Schutmaat says. Like the poet, he would look for images based on what Hugo termed the “truth of his feelings”—a sense that continued as he went farther north and south of Hugo’s known territory.

Schutmaat searched for places with an industrial history, loosely planning routes from one mining town to the next. But most of the time he just set off on the road, stopping at sites that spoke to him. “I wandered in and out of these towns in a constant state of observation,” he says. He also stopped in countless bars and diners, and his conversations with strangers increasingly led him to make portraits, both on the spot and in miners’ homes.

His most memorable visit was with a former miner named Chuck. “We ended up sharing a bottle of whiskey as he told me about his years mining and driving a bulldozer in Butte, about drinking and getting into trouble,” Schutmaat says. Chuck also told Schutmaat about the loss of his son, killed in a construction accident. It reminded Schutmaat of his own loss: “During the whole time I was shooting the project I found myself thinking of my father, and his dreams, and the way he would have gotten along with so many of the guys I was meeting.”

While he remains in touch with a few of his subjects, including Chuck, most were brief moments in a journey covering thousands of miles and spanning more than 50 towns and as many wilderness areas. His photos will be on view at the Catherine Edelman gallery in Chicago this fall and the New­space Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 2014. However far his work ranges, Schutmaat is still inspired by his initial hero. “Rich­ard Hugo was, in a sense, my copilot,” he says.

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“My original plan was to photograph nomadic communities in South America,” Larsen says. Having had an interest in human migration since the beginning of her photography career, she decided nine years ago to commit herself long-term to a project that would allow her to experience how these cultures really live.

But Larsen’s early ventures into the Southern Hemisphere weren’t the right fit, in part due to language barriers and the need for guides. Then, while researching nomadic groups elsewhere, she learned of the Sami people, of the arctic region from northern Scandinavia to northern Russia. While historically known for herding reindeer, in the past few decades the group has largely been urbanized into Scandinavian culture. About 10 percent still live within Saamis (villages where herders live in season), bringing caribou back and forth between winter and summer pastures each year.

Larsen’s introduction came by way of a family from Saltoluokta, Sweden, in 2007. Over a few weeks’ stay with that family, she realized this was a subject she wanted to explore more deeply. And having always been a believer in complete immersion, she moved to Kautokeino, Norway, where she lived as a family’s housekeeper for more than two years.

She looks back on her earlier images, many of which are collected in her book Sami: Walking With Reindeer (published in partnership with Emphas.is), as some of the most valuable for their detached view as a spectator. “Everything, at the beginning, was fresh and unfamiliar,” she says.

Larsen was in Kautokeino for nearly a year before she had earned enough money to sustain a longer visit by selling photos to various publications in the U.S. At the end of the first year, she received a Fulbright fellowship to study the Northern Sami language at a local university.

Learning the language gave her access to older, non-English-speaking Sami. And it allowed her to understand conversations when she took part in the reindeer migration herding, which takes up to six weeks each in the fall and spring. These journeys gave her some of her most important lessons in how and why to capture certain documentary images. “I would photograph reindeer in close-up, but I began to notice that Sami herders were interested in studying them from far off, to anticipate their migration,” Larsen says. Her observations began to shape how she photographed.

Larsen concluded her photographic work on the series in 2011; she says her relationships with the people she pictured have grown rather than faded in the years since. Discussing her experiences, Larsen easily falls into the description of customs and traditions in Sami terms. “I don’t think I’ll ever get the Sami out of me,” she jokes. “It’s part of my life now.”

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Echoing generations of landscape photographers, Matthew Brandt says, “What makes nature such a compelling subject is that it’s truly inexhaustible.” The 31-year-old Los Angeles–based artist has explored the natural world and its disruptions over the past few years, most prominently in his series Lakes and Reservoirs. These landscape photographs are bathed after printing in solutions made partly of water collected from the source he’s depicting. Brandt has incorporated the material of his subjects into images ranging from bees to trees to demolition projects near his studio.

If experimenting with the processing and surfaces of photographic prints seems like a relic in the digital age, it’s far from it. If anything, today’s predominance of screen-only interaction has made the importance of the photo as object more beguiling to both emerging and established photographers. Von Lintel Gallery in New York City held a show last spring organized around such an interest. Titled Unique, the group show featured photographers including Brandt who explore the material process of image-making. Gallery director Amy Sande-Friedman says that the artists in the show tended to work physically with their photographs when they used natural subjects.

“There’s a renewed interest in hands-on types of work,” Sande-Friedman says, citing Klea McKenna’s photogram series Rain Studies, the chemigram-based work of Amanda Means, and the traveling camera obscura of John Chiara. “When we increasingly use the computer to mediate between ourselves and the natural world, there’s more desire to engage with it directly. These artists are interested in really getting inside nature—both in organic imagery and working with nature as an idea.”

Brandt’s work on Lakes and Reservoirs extended in part from experiments with salted-paper printing, but he says chemistry was more a road to an idea than the idea itself. He was also inspired by a popular story that the British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner had himself strapped to the mast of a boat in order to experience the full force of a gale before painting it. “It’s having a fuller understanding of nature when working with it,” Brandt says. Watching the way that lake water degraded print emulsions gave him a broader sense of the process of natural erosion.

As he continued to develop his technique, Brandt found that he was getting results that, much like erosion itself, were controlled yet unpredictable. “I like the idea of guiding, assisting,” Brandt says. “When things end up being overly controlled, you can tell that it lacks gesture.”

Since his lake-water experiments, Brandt has incorporated a range of natural phenomena into the photo-making process. For his series Honeybees—conceived in 2007, when he began noticing masses of bees dying on a local beach from colony collapse disorder—Brandt photographed the insects and used their carcasses in the emulsion for his prints. In a more recent series, Night Skies, he applies cocaine directly to black photographer’s velvet then sandwiches the image between plates of clear glass.

And Brandt’s heliographs of the La Brea Tar Pits—stemming from the first-ever permanent photographic process of 19th-century inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, which involved hardening an asphalt derivative on pewter and washing away certain areas with lavender oil—make both the substance and capture of his subject part of the unique final images.

Smoke Screen
Interacting with nature in the process of making an image can be intensely personal. In her six-year series The Burn, Evanston, Illinois–based photographer Jane Fulton Alt shadowed restoration ecologists to capture images of controlled prairie fires, a subject she first encountered in 2007 during an artist’s residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. Witnessing a controlled fire on the grounds there, she photographed it, collected some ash, and asked some of the ecologists involved if she could follow them for a shoot.

Alt’s first trip out the following spring had a greater significance: It coincided with the birth of her first grandchild. It was also her sister’s first day of chemotherapy treatment for ovarian cancer. When she looked through the viewfinder, Alt says, “I was thinking about the parallels between the burn on the prairie and the burn going on in [my sister’s] body. For me, it became a whole parallel universe and process and a way of trying to understand the life cycles.”

The ensuing series, which recently concluded and which is being released in October as a book (The Burn, Kehrer Verlag), was as much about the images as it was about focusing on that connection, which sustained Alt throughout her sister’s battle with the disease. “They became much more subjective pictures than they would have been if I had simply documented the burn,” she recalls. “I shied away from shooting the fire—it felt too violent, and I was more interested in the ephemeral quality of the smoke.” The images focus instead on its obscuring, destructive, and regenerative properties.

Photographically, The Burn was also an extension of Alt’s earlier work altering image surfaces with beeswax to add luminosity to prints of natural subjects. The smoke, she says, “was the first time I’d found that luminosity in the subject of the print itself”—and while she was satisfied with uncoated prints for the book and exhibitions, on individual prints for custom copies of the book she applies coats of beeswax to add depth.

The shooting experience was both intense and strangely soothing, especially as she returned to it repeatedly over time. While the restoration ecologists Alt trailed were careful to keep her out of danger, she found herself nevertheless compelled toward the hot ash, making images, coming home with her clothes and equipment blanketed in soot. For Alt, it was as much about being immersed in the physical environment as it was about capturing final images—having the tangible experience of natural burn and regrowth helped her to tie the idea for the series into a broader idea of both ecological and human life cycles.

Her sister died of her disease, but Alt found that having worked with controlled fires as closely as she had enabled her to cope in a way she otherwise might not have. “I was able to focus on the loss within a larger idea of regeneration, the idea that new life comes out of things that die or pass away,” she says. The work is dedicated to her sister.

Constructive Destruction
For Australia-based Odette England’s project Thrice Upon a Time, working with the material of the landscape was literally tied to the land itself. England focused on the terrain of her childhood home, a 200-acre farm in the small settlement of Ponde in South Australia, by a two-step process: a 2005 journey (before conceiving the project) to capture the location on film, and a 2010 return by her parents, who re-trod the area with the processed negatives attached to the soles of their shoes.

For England, the concept of having the film “work the land” related to how her parents physically worked the land when she was a child, before the threat of financial troubles forced her family to leave in 1989. “Living on a farm not only ties you to a specific economy, but also to seasonal rhythms,” she says. “The farm has changed hands four or five times since then, and with each passing year and new owner, I can’t help but feel that the farm dies a small death.”

England relocated to a nearby rural area as an adolescent and later would often drive past the farm; it wasn’t until December 2005, returning with a medium-format Hasselblad film camera, that she captured it. She processed the film and held onto the negatives but wasn’t sure what to do with the project. In 2010, while living in Providence, Rhode Island, she ran across the negatives and began experimenting with them on a lightbox—scratching some, cutting others, burning a few. “It was cathartic and horrifying, but I was enthralled,” she says.

Feeling more directly connected to her childhood memories of love versus loss, England ultimately came upon the idea of her parents’ revisiting the farm: “traversing it on my behalf—looking for locations of where they’d taken snapshots of my brother and me as children,” she says. Over six to eight months, her parents took numerous treks, each time with three to five negatives taped to each shoe. Some came back relatively intact, others in fragments; England turned them into large-scale pigment prints.

Ultimately, she says, photographing the farm wouldn’t have made sense without a material connection—what had been lacking in her memory was that physical relationship. “It was an urgent thing to understand this particular patch of dirt,” England says. “It was the material that made me.”

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