Thanks :)

Thanks to all who participated in the 'Take Down' of the Erin Harper Vernon Take Down Sunday! :)
Photo 612 is Closed for the summer and is revamping for the fall- Look for more news in September.
Otherwise, Join us Sunday for a picnic and the PHillips Mill Photo Show.
Happy Summer :)

Come Celebrate Erin Harper Vernon

"My photographic work investigates the contemporary landscape of industrial America and examines our modern dependence on and destruction of the land. Hazardous waste sites, power plants, containment systems, and poisoned communities are connective themes in my photographs, reflecting a place of intersection between nature, industry, and community. I am interested in conveying through my images an aberrant relationship between humans and the land because we have changed our natural landscape through settlement, deforestation, and environmental pollution. Economic, population, and technological growth has fueled our modern dependence on and destruction of the land. Pollution has becomes synonymous to our cultures current demands for a quality of life while creating a waste-world in our very backyards that infringes on the quality of our health.
To experience these sites is like stepping back a hundred years, to witness America in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century during the industrial revolution, a place where man and machine dominate the land but with a modernized efficiency of new technology. Over the past year, I traveled cross-country visiting brown fields, EPA sites, strip mines, and poisoned communities. These images bear witness to the places I have visited and some of the people I have met. In these images I chose to hinder the horizon with man-made power lines, containment systems, smokestacks, power plants, and refineries. Visually obstructing, condensing, and flattening the horizon helps to provoke a sense of unease or quiet sickness. This repeated empty space of dead grass, pavement, or field in all of the photographs, serves as an intended metaphor for disconnect in my images as I pull the viewer’s eye back from the center of the image to evoke a feeling of abandonment, expanse space, or desolation.
At first glance many of these images appear as fakes, like constructed sets on a movie lot or digitally manipulated miniatures for the camera. Part of this illusion is emphasized by the lack of the human figures in the photograph; there is seldom a car or person in the foreground to reference scale of the buildings. The absence of people reinforces the presence of what people have constructed in the landscape. At first humans
may not seem to be present in the images; however, people are very much an integral part of the subject matter because the construction or destruction made by humans is the central topic of every photograph. I choose to omit people from Homelands to help separate the landscape from the human form or it’s belonging to an “other.” Deleting people from Homelands helps to make each space more general, as if the town could be anybody’s hometown.
Some of these sites are well known to the public, but many of them are not famous and are generally unknown to most people. . These lesser known towns and toxic spaces don’t share the same sense of disaster in the public eye usually equated with the more infamous sites such as Three Mile Island or Love Canal. However, these smaller and less familiar sites need the same public attention because these toxic places are equally devastating, costly, and dangerous to the ecosystem compared to other well-known disasters. These images are intended to empower and inform the viewer, while asking them to examine the impact of pollution in a familiar space being the landscape of our own hometowns and local communities.
The house becomes the factory in several of my images, or a foundation in the shadow of the power plant; searving, as a visual metaphor to reference the human body. Smoke stacks transform the building into a dangerous factory emitting chemical smoke, the type of pollution a person would want to protect themselves against by taking shelter inside their home. These images begin to investigate the border between civic space in the community and private place of the individual.
I want my viewer to have a sense that each town is not isolated but is part of a shared, very real and very human experience not unlike his or her own environment and the more critical eye that they may turn toward it. "

Erin Harper Vernon