Focusing your camera on a city park at any time of year can ignite a blaze of lights and spools of color dancing just above the spectrum of human sight. Prospect Park’s unseen array is composed of stunning orange, cobalt blue, and cadmium red—an altered reality captured in the blink of the camera’s shutter.
Nature exudes a spectrum of light waves and colors that escape the eye but are ever-present in the world we inhabit. Green trees, plants, and clouds reflect intense waves of infrared light throughout the day and night, while the sky remains a dark canvas across which the flora plays. This hidden spectrum is beautiful yet invisible, but real—a part of the world with which we unknowingly interact daily. For this project, I modified my camera sensor to make it sensitive to the unseen.
As I captured these photos, I absorbed the bucolic smell of nature and visualized hazy sunsets, pervasive smoke from fires, hurricanes, and other dangers lurking ominously in the future. The sumptuous colors radiate heat, concern, toxicity, and distress. They depict the invisible yet real threat of climate change.
Designers Olmsted and Vaux honored the unseen portraiture in Prospect Park by creating paths that wind through the landscape, crafting the illusion of wide-open space within one of the world’s largest cities. These infrared C-prints of Prospect Park, reminiscent of Japanese screens, pay tribute to the illusionary aesthetic of this monumental urban expanse. They urge us to consider climate change as something visible right outside our windows. Mounted on white acrylic, these pieces resemble glass plates.
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