Conquest of the Vertical. Julie Shafer

About

With a six-foot pinhole camera lined with photographic paper, Los Angeles artist Julie Shafer traveled to landscapes in various California locations marked by the presence of American pioneers mining for gold, silver, and other minerals in the mid 1800's. The images--typically seventy two inches tall by forty inches wide--were produced on-location using a U-Haul truck that the artist converted into a portable darkroom. Shafer's photographic apparatus relied on mirrors, the same process used by historical photographic figures such as Carleton Watkins. But whereas Watkins framed an idealized version of the landscape, this artist does nearly the opposite, exposing--albeit with varying degrees of subtlety and abstraction--evidence of the devastation once visited upon the land and its native inhabitants by the mining industry.