MICHAEL LUNDGREN is a Phoenix-based landscape photographer who has photographed the desert for years, and taught himself an appreciation for its distinct geology and plant and animal life. A recently completed photographic series titled Transfigurations will be released in book form this fall through Radius Books — this photograph is from that series. For the photographer, the significance of the title resides in the transformative power of photography and time on this seemingly immutable landscape, and what can be revealed in his relationship to both. Deep in Mexico’s Sonoran desert, Lundgren photographed an enormous lava vent formed before humans roamed the earth—a space that is home to barn owls and the tiny skeletons of their prey, as well as the tracks of the region’s largest predator, the mountain lion. Lundgren’s beautifully-crafted image explores the extremes of the desert: light and dark, empty space as sculpture, the expressive within the reductive. Often exposing his film over an extended period, Lundgren connects to his subjects’ larger sense of time and existence, whether a catastrophic event millennia ago or the quiet decomposition of an animal’s bones under the light of the moon. All come together to comment on the phenomenological interconnectedness and transience of life. “My pictures refer to something of the heart of these places,” he writes, “not by description but by metaphor. ...They are about creating an entrance into another world, one that is just below the surface of what is visible. I wish to photograph the impossible, to fix the fugitive on film. In the desert nothing remains static; even the rocks move. I believe there is a trace of life in what remains of everything, and in this a sense of our own mortality.” ACTIVE SINCE 1988 the "Help-MoPA-Buy-This-Print" Program has successfully supported art aquisitions resulting in the addition of neraly 25 prints to the Museum's permanent collection. Your contribution goes directly toward the purchase of this print and will insure its place in the Permanent Collection at MoPA. |