Sierra Book Description
The Sierra
photographic works by Aaron Rothman, 2018 – 2023
Grappling with conflicting feelings of awe and anxiety in a time of mounting climate crisis, The Sierra is a timely reexamination of a place that has long defined American ideas of wilderness. Comprising approximately 50 color images photographed over the course of five years with a large-format film camera, the project mixes “straight” photographs with a variety of digital processing techniques. The work reimagines how to convey the physical sensation of being in the mountains, visually embody ongoing environmental changes, and evoke a broader European lineage of landscape imagery.
The Sierra Nevada spurred my love of the natural world and inspired me to take up photography as a teenager. More recently, my sense of wonder in those mountains has been joined by an intensifying dread. Physical signs of climate change are more evident every year, and forest fires have become a constant presence – be it smoke haze filling the sky or newly burned areas on my regularly traveled routes. I am still awed and consoled on my regular trips to the Sierra. However, an anticipatory sense of loss now attends each visit. Through my photographic work, I aim to embody the uncertainties and contradictions that underlie both my individual experience in the Sierra and our collective relationship with the natural world more generally.
I work iteratively in a repeating two-stage process of field and studio. Using a large-format film camera, I make exposures responding to a sense of connection to time and place brought on by, for example, the immeasurable sense of space evinced by a distant mountain peak, the sheltering confines of a copse of trees at dusk, or the devastation of a recently charred section of forest. In the studio, I work digitally with the photographs to discover their final form. I leave some images “straight”; others I change significantly – inverting the colors, digitally layer multiple views of the same place, washing out the image to the edge of visibility. Throughout this process, I keep in mind various historical touchstones – from Jacob Van Ruisdael to Théodore Rousseau to Albert Bierstadt – questioning how much this visual tradition has shaped my personal understanding and set the stage for the current state of the Sierra.
The Sierra has long represented an ideal of American wilderness. Its evident vulnerability to climate change and human activity is a signal that these ideas of wilderness – and the ways of picturing it – need to be reimagined. My goal is to create emotionally resonant images that are a bit uncanny – that seem somehow right even though obviously manipulated, or that feel off despite being perfectly unaltered. With one eye contemplating the Sierra’s unsettled future, and one examining the visual tradition which marks its past, this project aims to move beyond the human vs. nature dualism implicit in both the tradition of picturing the pristine beauty of the Sierra and the documentations of its destruction.