Thermal

Yellowstone’s geothermal basins can feel less like landscape than evidence of another world. Heat rises from beneath the ground, mineral-rich water reshapes the surface, and microbial life turns changes in temperature and chemistry into fields of yellow, orange, green, black, and blue. What first appears almost abstract is, in fact, a record of living processes and geological forces continually acting upon one another.

I was drawn to the places where those forces became visible: the sharp boundaries between colors, mineral crusts spreading across water, reflections of sky broken by delicate ridges, and pools whose surfaces reveal only hints of the depth below. In some places, geothermal activity sustains unexpected forms of life; in others, it overwhelms what had grown there before.

These photographs look closely at a landscape that seems both primordial and unfinished. Water flows, minerals accumulate, organisms establish themselves along narrow thresholds, and the surface is continually altered. The apparent stillness of the photograph holds only one brief state of a place that is always becoming something else.