SECOND NATURE

In 1997, Susan Sontag wrote in her collection of essays, On Photography, “Photographs have increased our access to knowledge and experiences of history and faraway places, but the images may replace direct experience and limit reality.”

As climate change becomes an increasingly pressing topic, it is timely to study the changes in our relationship to Nature and to ask if our perceptions of how we want to engage Nature are in line with what our actual behavior is. Second Nature encourages thought about how we actually experience the outdoors (often from the interior), how online distribution and the oversaturation of imagery affects our perception of Nature, how the vast number of images we make replace real engagement, photography’s role in all of this change, and, possibly most important, how simulating Nature has become a part of our consumer culture. Exhibited in a variety of media, the pieces work together to slowly build into a powerful statement.