Rusting tin cans, shattered glass, and disintegrating plastic fill the frame from edge to edge, extending beyond all four sides so that the composition has no background, no horizon, no ground that is not covered. The palette is unexpectedly rich: deep ochre, oxidized orange, the dull silver of aluminum, scattered notes of faded color. John Stathatos photographs this site under natural light as he would photograph any landscape, bringing the same attention to tone and texture that the tradition of landscape photography has always required.
Rusting tin cans, shattered glass, and disintegrating plastic fill the frame from edge to edge, extending beyond all four sides so that the composition has no background, no horizon, no ground that is not covered. The palette is unexpectedly rich: deep ochre, oxidized orange, the dull silver of aluminum, scattered notes of faded color. John Stathatos photographs this site under natural light as he would photograph any landscape, bringing the same attention to tone and texture that the tradition of landscape photography has always required.
Airs, Waters, Places V works through a critical proposition that Stathatos has developed across the series: that landscape is not a natural given but a cultural construct, an ideological product of the society that perceives it as such. Photographing a waste site according to the conventions of landscape photography: natural light, considered framing, attention to atmospheric condition, forces the viewer to encounter the refuse as landscape. The curator Lucius Burckhardt identified this logic when he argued that landscape is always the product of a specific culture and period; Stathatos turns the argument against the tradition, presenting the land as it actually is rather than as the construct would have it.
This is what separates Stathatos from Burtynsky’s industrial surveys, which operate at epic scale and transform environmental devastation into images of formal grandeur. As Stathatos has observed, such images implicitly celebrate the capitalist achievement they document, regardless of intent. Airs, Waters, Places V refuses that scale: the subject is consumer refuse rather than industrial output, and the argument works at the level of the individual object: the single crushed tin can, present in its thousands, its ordinariness the point.
