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The pioneering nineteenth-century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins visited Yosemite during a time of rapid industrialization in the American West, but you’d never know it from the majestic tranquility of the rivers, mountains, forests, and rock faces he depicted. In her book “River of Shadows,” Rebecca Solnit, chronicling the life of another influential photographer of the time, Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies of high-speed movement helped to pioneer motion-picture technology, wrote that Watkins’s landscapes “looked like the true world everyone sought but no one else could locate among the mining booms, railroad building, land grabs, mobs, and murders” of the period. And yet Watkins’s images—which provided many people back East their first views of Yosemite’s idyllic splendor—were, in some sense, an advertisement for the possibilities of the West, and the vast untapped resources that American corporations of the eighteen-sixties and seventies were rushing to exploit.
For their project “Processed Views,” which is currently on view in the exhibit “Changing Circumstances” at the FotoFest 2016 Biennial, the collaborators Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have produced cheeky dioramas that pull Watkins’s iconic images brashly into the industrial modern world. Using all manner of highly processed foods—Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Coca-Cola, marshmallows, fleshy stacks of bologna—they recreated the photographer’s famous landscapes from Yosemite and other California sites as garish candy lands. A photo of the Albion River in Mendocino, California, becomes a milky pool snaking through rainbowed mountains of Froot Loops; the imposing face of Cathedral Rock, at Yosemite, is reconstructed as a heaping pile of white bread. Ciurej and Lochman first met at the I.I.T. Institute of Design, in Chicago, and have been creating work together for three decades, including previous projects that explore the intersection of the human and natural worlds. (For their project “Ponder Food as Love,” they made sensuous closeup portraits of fruits and vegetables nestled among human body parts: a cluster of grapes perched along the curves of a back; a plump fig resting on top of an eye.) They’ve said that “Processed Views” is intended as a “cautionary tale,” highlighting the cost of America’s industrial food production and “the seductive and alarming intersection of nature and technology.”
