I am repeatedly drawn to the exuberant, otherworldly landscape of South San Francisco Bay. There, depending on the mood of a Sunday, I can bring binoculars to bear on the still abundant wildlife, explore diverse halophilic microorganisms with a field microscope, hike out to ponder early engineering interventions scattered across the Bay shallows, or (my favorite) launch a kite-lofted camera to photograph juxtapositions in the landscape from above. And juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions.
Over time my idle curiosity became a sustained fascination. For behind the visual richness of these juxtapositions lie the South Bay’s interesting history and the active formulation, at this very moment, of bold initiatives for its future. So, for five years now I have hiked the Salt Ponds and taken low-level aerial photographs over the South Bay salt ponds using cameras lofted by kites. That these images are often visually compelling is in no small part because they reveal hidden and often enigmatic aspects of the landscape. It turns out that aerial images greatly reduce sky reflection from the salt pond surfaces thus exposing colors, textures and traces of the Bay’s previous epochs. With vantage points ranging between three and three hundred feet above the ground, this exhibit focuses on the exuberant colors and textures of South San Francisco Bay.
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