Badlands, South Dakota 1990

Lois Conner made this photograph in South Dakota using a large format camera. The whole image has a kind of silvery tone, but look how the foreground seems to bristle with small dark marks and details, which become fainter and fade into the background. The photographic process here seems so important - the way the light is caught and held on the surface of the print. It’s like Conner isn’t just showing us the Badlands, but also showing us how photography can transform a landscape into something else. The textures feel exaggerated, and the distances become flattened. That central butte seems to have a human face carved into it. I think of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of clouds – he called them ‘equivalents’ – because they weren’t just pictures of clouds, but metaphors for thoughts and feelings. Maybe Conner's Badlands are equivalents too, like a mirror for something in the human soul.