In 1799, German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt set out on a trip through the Americas, cataloging all he could find: plants, minerals, capybaras, canals, etc. Humboldt suggested. that the world is “a wonderful living thing where everything is interconnected” —a theory that would inspire Charles Darwin. He introduced the concept of ecology and was one of the first naturalists to document humanity’s destructive impact on the Earth.
In 2017, photographer Christopher Edward Rodriguez came across Humboldt’s writings. He was thinking about what a camera could actually see when nearly every inch of the planet had been “shaped, oriented, and photographed to death”. He took Humboldt’s ideas and set out across the Americas to create a series of images that showed the planet “as if it had never been seen before”. He used long exposures, artificial light, and color gels to “break the scientific accuracy of the camera.” His aim for the photographs was to convey a mood of “consistent weirdness,” a mood that embodies a forgotten Humboldt tenet: “Everything is interactive and reciprocal.”
