Matthew Brandt’s Lakes and Reservoirs begins with a deliberately literal circuit between place and picture. Photographing lakes and reservoirs across the western United States, Brandt collects water from each site, produces a color C-print of that body of water, and then submerges the print in the water it depicts. The immersion may continue for days, weeks, or months. The landscape thus does more than furnish an image: it becomes an active agent in the photograph’s transformation.
As the water alters the print’s emulsion, familiar views fracture into vivid color, stains, veils, and painterly passages. Some photographs retain a legible horizon or shoreline; others approach complete abstraction. This variation is central to the series. Brandt does not apply a single decorative effect but permits the chemical encounter between a particular print and its source water to determine how far representation will hold—or dissolve.
The method joins two histories often kept apart: the expansive landscape photography of the American West and the experimental processes associated with photography’s nineteenth-century beginnings. Here, however, the landscape is neither a distant spectacle nor a passive object of record. Matter from the depicted place participates in making and partially unmaking its own image, collapsing the usual separation between subject, process, and photographic surface. The resulting works consider both the physical condition of lakes and reservoirs and the material instability of traditional color photography.
Published by Damiani in 2014, this 176-page hardcover brings the series into sustained view. Its significance for a serious photography collection rests in the clarity and rigor of Brandt’s proposition: a recognizable landscape tradition is reworked through direct material contact with the world it represents. The volume permits close comparison across the series, from descriptive vistas to images overtaken by chromatic disruption, and records an approach in which photographic process is not secondary to the subject but inseparable from it.
