Anthony Martinez–Galvan

Untitled (Angeles National Forest, Wandering In The Sea Of Fog) 

UV-coated archival polychrome inkjet prints on acrylic 

2016-2022

H 20" x W 152"

The work interrogates landscape photography, specifically its role as an ideological apparatus and technological aid in westward expansion and colonialism. Through the appropriation of seriality, a typological system historically used for cataloguing in anthropology and land surveying, the work comprises a sequence of nine portrait-format photographs taken with a 4x5 large-format camera. 

Each frame is structured as a score of space depicting a fog-laden landscape along a trail ridge in the Angeles National Forest, overlooking the Los Angeles Basin. Fog serves as a poetic device that obfuscates, functioning as a veil that voids the background, compresses the midground, and centers the foreground as the primary subject. Shrubs, bushes, and yucca, native to the California Chaparral, take the stage as ecological agents. Grounded in the land, they bear witness to time and social changes.

In some frames, traces of human activity and infrastructure emerge, highlighting an ecology once considered wilderness and now preserved as a national site for amusement, recreation, and institutional research. These contradictions, shaped and sustained by the extension of capitalism, Empire, and national identity, linger within the apparatus that is landscape.

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