American Photography 33 Winners

Healing Landscape: A Damaged World in Transition (2 of 20)

San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds, Healing Landscape: A Damaged World in Transition (2 of 20), January 2017. This past year I was inspired to create a body of work capturing the unearthly visual landscape of the vast San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds. Once home to a stunning array of wildlife and plants, viewed from above these wetlands are now a world of searing colors and swirling patterns. Yet their complex industrial history, including the use of their salt to manufacture napalm in the 1960s—the searing effects of which I witnessed firsthand during my upbringing as a young Buddhist monk in Vietnam—has increasingly led me to see them in a new light. Ultimately what inspired me to spend an entire year dangling from a helicopter in frigid weather to make these images was the story of this thriving land in transition: a healing landscape that unites many worlds as one. #3 of 26, print: 43" by 64, ed. of 6 and 2 A/P

Healing Landscape: A Damaged World in Transition (1 of 20)

San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds, Healing Landscape: A Damaged World in Transition (1 of 20), December 2016. This past year I was inspired to create a body of work capturing the unearthly visual landscape of the vast San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds. Once home to a stunning array of wildlife and plants, viewed from above these wetlands are now a world of searing colors and swirling patterns. Yet their complex industrial history, including the use of their salt to manufacture napalm in the 1960s—the searing effects of which I witnessed firsthand during my upbringing as a young Buddhist monk in Vietnam—has increasingly led me to see them in a new light. Ultimately what inspired me to spend an entire year dangling from a helicopter in frigid weather to make these images was the story of this thriving land in transition: a healing landscape that unites many worlds as one. #3 of 26, print: 44" by 74, ed. of 6 and 2 A/P