Such an Effortless Choice

Such an Effortless Choice examines how nature is continuously translated through systems of photography, display, and management. Using direct photography, the diptychs trace how natural forms are framed, replicated, and re-enter daily life as images.

These diptychs begin with nature and repeatedly return to it. Working through direct photography, the project records how nature is continuously translated, situated, and managed in contemporary contexts. Rather than presenting an idea of “untouched nature,” the images focus on the forms that emerge once nature enters technological systems, regimes of display, and human order: framed, replicated, monitored, performed, or substituted.

Rocks, animals, and plants appear alongside their reproduced or exhibited counterparts. They seem to converge formally, yet this juxtaposition points to processes of operation, domestication, and imagination at work. Within these pairings, nature no longer exists solely as a distant landscape; it enters everyday life through various kinds of stand-ins. It is photographed, preserved, and displayed, becoming an image that can be repeatedly viewed.

The black-and-white diptychs propose a process of looking. As natural realities are continuously translated into images and objects, our relationship to them is subtly reconfigured. Through editing and sequencing, the doubles of the images suspend definitive conclusions, instead making this shift itself visible. They gesture toward textures, mechanisms, stones, animals, and human bodies in the real world, while also exposing photography’s inherent acts of selection, occlusion, and reorganization.