A deep pit of red earth is filled with charred waste and smoldering refuse, and from its center a column of white smoke rises against the sky. The composition has a vertical axis: the smoke, cutting through an image otherwise organized horizontally by layers of red earth, blackened debris, and the pit’s far wall. John Stathatos photographs the scene as he would photograph any landscape: with patience, in natural light, giving the subject its full weight.
A deep pit of red earth is filled with charred waste and smoldering refuse, and from its center a column of white smoke rises against the sky. The composition has a vertical axis: the smoke, cutting through an image otherwise organized horizontally by layers of red earth, blackened debris, and the pit’s far wall. John Stathatos photographs the scene as he would photograph any landscape: with patience, in natural light, giving the subject its full weight.
The rising smoke is the image’s most charged element. In the akea series (1995), Stathatos photographed burned vegetation on a Greek island within hours of a brush fire: that smoke embodied Heraclitean fire as elemental transformation, destruction as the precondition of renewal. The smoke in Airs, Waters, Places VI rises from smoldering consumer waste. The visual language is the same; the substance could not be more different. What was purifying has become toxic; what was elemental is now petrochemical. The landscape is exhaling, but what it exhales is not clean.
The series title comes from the Hippocratic treatise that argued the natural environment: air quality, water purity, the orientation of the land, was foundational to human wellbeing. Stathatos presents the systematic inversion of that proposition: a landscape where those conditions have been degraded beyond recovery. The red earth holds its saturated color against the grey smoke and ash, its visual force insisting on what was here before what is here now.
