The following article was originally published by Square Cylinder in August 2025.

San Francisco is a city of microclimates. Neighborhood temperatures can vary by twenty degrees, one foggy, one warm and bright. Conditions may be exacerbated by summer climes which draw hot, dry air from interior farmlands, or the damp, cool expanse near the Pacific Ocean. Where they meet, condensation forms instantly, perspiring in a chill. But this day at Ft. Mason is an envelope for other weathers and geologic features. “Elemental II: Photography and the Hand of Nature” is the second iteration of a group show featuring the work of John Chiara, Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Chris McCaw, and Meghann Riepenhoff — artists whose practices collaborate with the natural environment, using the photograph as a record of the more than human interaction.

A suite of four framed photos by Danh captures unpeopled scenes from national parks, including two of boulders from Joshua Tree and two color-tinted cacti from Saguaro National Park that hang together like deserted landscapes that are both iconic and mundane. The four daguerreotypes are printed in the fashion of Ansel Adams and earlier landscape surveyors who advocated for Western Expansion and Manifest Destiny. The stunning detail of each of Danh’s images is inscribed on a reflective metal surface, incorporating the happenstance disruption of their surroundings. By reflecting such immediacies, even to the extent that anyone attempting to photograph the work immediately eclipses the landscape with their own reflected image, Danh emphasizes the extent to which landscapes include and are too easily obliterated by human subjectivities.

Two other artists use large scale, hand-built cameras to capture landscape’s signature. Chiara uses a camera obscura as big as a trailer. It’s so big, he can enter the camera to set up the image and photo paper, after which he must crawl through a bag-tunnel to remove the lens. During the exposure he covers the lens with his hand to dodge and burn the print by intuition. “Cabrillo Highway at Pescadero Creek Road, Variation 8,” (2016) captures an ocean beach interrupted by an outcropping of rocks. In the image, however, the beach looks more like a mossy green surface of fog. Chiara’s treatment is further disrupted by streaking treatments of color and blown out, cream-white edges that streak toward the center to fade into light blue, semi-transparent shards. Bucking conservative trends in photography that once aspired to crisply “real” image-making, Chiara’s surprising disruption adds an air of intimacy to the image. The landscape itself is not remarkable in its own right, instead feeling like a faded memory of a ghost frozen at an epic scale and mounted on the wall. 

McCaw uses his own design of a large format camera, keeping the shutter open so that the sun inscribes its passage across the entire sky, searing the original negative as it goes. In “Sunburned GSP #857 (Late Evening / Sunrise, North Slope, Arctic Circle)” (2015) a landscape-oriented picture plane is divided into six vertical rectangles of equal size, like a flattened zoetrope. In this instance, the image charts a summertime Arctic sun path. The line never sinks below the horizon line because the sun never sets. Like a bow, it approaches a wide view of a largely indistinguishable earth with scrub-like foliage reading like a washed-out mid-tone abstraction. Then the sun’s path veers back up to the higher skies where its line grows stronger, burning through the photo paper to signify time’s passage.  

Riepenhoff also collaborates with natural elements, focusing on water flows, ice, and minerals, setting up her photographic paper at shorelines and waterlines, whether “natural” or human-made, to capture the movement of water. In “Day 425.2: Waters of the Americas: EPA #IDN001002876 (Residual and Current Triumph Silver Min Contamination, Big Wood River, Idaho)” (2025), Riepenhoff produces an abstract photographic “painting” that traces water in a mine. The Triumph Mine operated in Idaho from the late 1800s until the 1950s and continues to leech toxic metals into the water supply even after clean-up efforts. “Day 425.2: Waters of the Americas” is a dark indigo blue, black, and gray composition recalling stalactites and rock where minerals have crystallized on the surface of the photograph. This is an assisted portrait of the movement of water within the mine as it struggles to metabolize a local industry of extraction which once made our country prosperous but now endures in waves of toxicity, like the ghosts of metals past. Here again, the photograph is a record of complex interrelations, capturing human presence, global industrial networks of production, and so-called natural vistas. As with all the artists on view, these meditations work within and also torque the tradition of American landscape photography. 

Connor’s work here also centers on water. “The Indus River, Ladakh India” (2024) is a sublimation print on aluminum. The majority of the black and white image is enriched by a portrait of the rocks it becomes in the foreground of the image, interrupted only by a pale white chaos of moving water. The Indus River is known as a transboundary river of Asia, passing through the Himalayas from Mount Kailash through disputed territories in Tibet, Kashmir, and Pakistan, then into the Arabian Sea. It’s one of the world’s major waterways, full of spiritual resonance. Yet in this case, what comes across is its narrow force. The momentum of its path refuses full capture, remaining blurred with small wave-like ridges on its surface that read like a chaotic flurry of fish, the residual impact of which have slowly but surely eaten into the rock face. In that dynamic, one sees the earth’s elements as active with the agency and collaboration of river and water, defining and shaping one another over centuries.

It is worth noting that, in an era of digital photography, these artists prefer analog methods. It’s as though they have found a response to Walter Benjamin’s nearly century-old critique that photography obfuscates the aura of authenticity in deference to reproducibility. Except for Connor’s river images, these works are not reproducible. Instead, their analog methods challenge our synthetic processes of attention to undermine human primacy. One could imagine this show representing landscape photography of the post-Anthropocene, where the human is decentered despite the force of environmental impact. Rather than collapse into the malaise of aesthetic disaster and entropy, this exhibition shows how the earth and its elements, like the Indus River, course through and ultimately obviate the theoretical bounds of human categories and nation-states.