John Pfahl

 I enjoy Pfahl's work because although images of landscapes are beautiful, they can easily become boring to look at and he transforms the  landscape by manipulating it in some way to make it more interesting. I chose these two images by the landscape photographer John Pfahl, because I think it is also interesting to look at the influence of technology on Pfahl's work as it becomes more advanced over time.

This image was taken in 1978 from Pfahl's lightning series. During this time, Pfahl would manipulate an image by adding an object, in this case a red string of some sort, directly onto an organic object, the tree. After Pfahl physically placed an object into a landscape, he would shoot the photo, and that would stand as the manipulation of a landscape. This is interesting to me because the red lightning shape becomes a part of the image and the light reflects off of the string as if was actually a part of the tree. I think this gives a different quality to the image than if someone were to photoshop a red line onto the tree because the line conforms to the shape of the tree and often times in Pfahl's images the physical object gets somewhat lost in the landscape. The red line is visible and would not naturally occur on its own, but the lines become a part of the tree and gets lost in the maze of thick and thin branches.

This image is from Pfahl's recent work Metamorphoses de la terre, done in 2010 at Zion Canyon. This image  is also a manipulated landscape but it is very different from the work done in 1978. It seems this image was taken, then digitally processed later to create the manipulation. The dragging of information into unnatural lines is somewhat interesting in the pattern it creates, and the manipulation causes me to try and imagine what the natural state of the canyon is. It is interesting to see the juxtaposition of digital and organic subject matter together, and without the digital manipulation I don't think this image would be interesting to me at all, but I do not find the post-processed image as interesting as the photo taken in 1978 which was physically manipulating then photographed. There are other photographs in the Metamorphoses series that are much more interesting to me because the image is slightly manipulated to where it could possibly be seen as a natural landscape, but the manipulation in this image very blatant, so I do not have to question whether or not the landscape is natural. I think this image is the weakest of the series and I enjoy Pfahl's earlier images more than his newer work, although I still like his newer work. These two images display the advancement in technology and the digital processes available to photographers nowadays.