Earth Herbarium

This project considers landscapes that have been significantly transformed by human activities. The new technologies used to produce these images allow us to imagine how the landscape of the future might look. In the first part, I compared images from Google Earth with my “herbarium” photos. Google’s photos of mines or deforestation were produced by a robot. This automatic eye treats the entire surface of the Earth equally. I created the herbarium photos carefully and individually, using infrared photography. But both images, of the Earth and the plants, become very personal and emotional when viewed through human eyes. The second series pairs Google images with photos found on Instagram. On the one side, Google’s images are the undiscerning scanner of human life, showing it in all its aspects and manifestations. On the other, are the daily snaps of human existence. The third series pairs Google images of the earth with NASA images of the surface of Mars. One can imagine an extinct civilization on Mars, its waste dumps and mining excavations covered by eons of planetary evolutionary dust, decay, slow absorption and change. The series invites its viewers to examine global interconnectedness and reflect on our strong, yet ultimately fragile home. —Evgeny Molodtsov