A hillside of intensely saturated red earth rises at close range, its surface scattered with plastic, metal fragments, and consumer waste. Above it, a sky of layered atmospheric clouds extends across the upper third of the frame: the kind of sky that belongs to Turner and the tradition of the picturesque sublime. John Stathatos places these two elements in direct confrontation. The sky is not ironic decoration; it is the argument made visible: what the land was, set against what it has become.
A hillside of intensely saturated red earth rises at close range, its surface scattered with plastic, metal fragments, and consumer waste. Above it, a sky of layered atmospheric clouds extends across the upper third of the frame: the kind of sky that belongs to Turner and the tradition of the picturesque sublime. John Stathatos places these two elements in direct confrontation. The sky is not ironic decoration; it is the argument made visible: what the land was, set against what it has become.
The series airs, waters, places (2009) takes its title from the Hippocratic treatise linking environment to the wellbeing of those who inhabit it, and presents the systematic inversion of that proposition. The intensely saturated red of the earth is what makes the confrontation work photographically: this is not a deadened, post-industrial palette but a living one, which makes the refuse on its surface more, not less, disturbing. Beauty has not been evacuated from the scene; it is present and actively contaminated.
Airs, Waters, Places IX refuses the scale and formal distance that make environmental devastation aesthetically manageable. The camera closes in on the density of individual objects, and the political argument works at the level of the specific rather than the panoramic. This distinguishes the series from Burtynsky’s large-format industrial surveys, which Stathatos has identified as operating within the tradition of the Capitalist Sublime: imagery whose formal grandeur implicitly celebrates the achievement it documents, whatever the photographer’s intent. This mound of red earth and its cargo of discarded matter is a nature morte in both senses: a still life, and a dead nature.
