On August 8, 2008 I took a helicopter ride over the Great Salt Lake to see the famous landmark Spiral Jetty. The trip was extremely enjoyable and the view, most impressive. The lake is so large that it feels like the sea, but the feeling of vastness quickly takes a back seat to the color and the texture that is an integral part of the lake. Depending on the depths, sometimes no water at all, and the type of bacteria and algae growing in various parts, the color of the water varies from red to blue and many shades in between. The photographs in these folio collections are reflective of my extraordinary experience over the Great Salt Lake. They are available in individual folios of archival pigment ink prints.
A slide show video of the photographs is also available: View the slide show
GSL Folio 1: The Pastel Collection
From the air the Great Salt Lake greets the eye with a range of hues that both amaze and delight. This folio contains photographs in soft cool tones with a salty appearance.
GSL Folio 2: The Found Patterns Collection
With eight photographs, it presents the patterns created by nature and by human touch. The nature’s patterns with a palette of minerals and evaporation challenge the canvas of most painters both in structure and artistry. Human touch, on the other hand, creates direct patterns which are easy to identify or through interference with nature which are much harder to discern.
GSL Folio 3: The Glow Collection
Looking down to the Great Salt Lake is a surreal experience, not only do the colors change unexpectedly but also the surface-depth-bottom relations present visual riddles. There I was in the helicopter, looking down at a reddish-orange, or orangeish-red water not being able to figure out what lied on the surface and where the bottom was. An unexpected glow seemed to come from beneath the surface delineating shapes, lines; of what I could not tell.
GSL Folio 4: The Fields of Color Collection
Minerals and evaporation in the Great Salt Lake work like the palette and the brush of an artist to create an amazing range of colors and abstract “art”, nature’s painting if you will. When this is combined with human efforts to extract different minerals, the result is divided parcels of colors, sometimes in stark contrast to each other.
GSL Folio 5: The Halophiles Collection
The marshes around the Great Salt Lake give way to halophiles, plant forms that require high salinity environments. Mostly algae that are visible in clumps from the air, the plant life mixed with the colored waters of the lake create surfaces reminiscent of paintings.
GSL Folio 6: The Spiral Jetty Collection
The Spiral Jetty stood below us wound up as a spring full of energy and tension, possibly reflective of its creator. Robert Smithson created the monumental earthwork, or land art in 1970 using black basalt rock available on location.
GSL Folio 7: The Borders & Boundaries Collection
The ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake contains rich variety. They create borders and boundaries where one stops and the other begins. The photographs in this collection explore some of these interesting borders and boundaries.
GSL Folio 8: The Human Touch Collection
Compared to the orderly creations of nature through apparent chaotic processes, the human touch seems to create chaotic visuals through apparent orderly processes. At least it seems so from sufficiently high altitude. (Note: In the printed folio some of the vertical photographs are combined into triptychs, thus contain fewer prints than the photograph seen in this gallery.)
