| Ground-Up: Photographs of the Ground in the Margins
of Los Angeles, an informative photograph and text display, was
shown to the public at the Center’s exhibit space in Los
Angeles for several weeks between September and November. The
exhibition used soil maps of Los Angeles County as a tool for
reexamining regional physiogeographic phenomena, as these curiously
compelling maps provide a unique view of the landscape, and the
human interventions within it.
Soil maps, published by the Natural Resources Conservation
Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are
aerial photographs with soil types superimposed on them, and they
serve as general guides for a range of activities, from agriculture
to mining and construction. While no substitute for the on-site
investigation of a soil engineer, soil maps can provide an overview
of large areas of land as well as features that are overlooked
on U.S. Geographical Survey topographical maps.
In addition to describing natural features, soil
maps provide a record of recent human interventions on the earth
and serve as a guideline for future land uses. The maps come with
tables assessing the suitability of soil types for a variety of
activities such as sand and gravel mining, septic tank filter
fields, agriculture and excavation.
The sites selected for representation in the exhibit
exemplify common soil interactions, in the margins of Los Angeles.
“As we looked at the utilization of soil for agriculture,
mining and recreation, and the control of erosion necessary for
the construction of Los Angeles’ ever expanding borders,”
said the exhibit curator, Erik Knutzen, “we found that it
is at these margins that the ground can be seen most clearly,
before paving erases the layers of meaning that soil contains.”
The exhibit featured several large format photographs
of these selected ground locations. The fine grain of the photographs
matched the grain of the depicted ground, and the authority and
weight that large, finely crafted images convey contrasted implicitly
with the nonplaces that filled the frame of each exposure, suggesting
to some the possible terminus of one limb of the tree of landscape
photography.
View
the online version of this exhibit.
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