Marion Belanger’s Rift/Fault takes as its subject the two edges of the North American Plate. Published by Radius Books, the hardcover volume sets photographs made in Iceland, where the North Atlantic Rift meets the Eurasian Plate, against photographs made along the San Andreas Fault in California, where the plate abuts the Pacific. In Iceland the land is raw and unstable, its geothermal infrastructure, hot pools, volcanic remnants and scattered houses recorded as facts of an unfinished terrain. In California the fault is no less active, yet the built environment carries on as though the ground beneath it were settled. Belanger’s attention to that contradiction gives the project its charge.
The pairing is the book’s method, not merely its format. Images from the two tectonic margins are placed in dialogue, so that the wild and the contained, the fertile and the barren, the geologic and the human press against one another. The result is a sustained visual tension, one that asks where geologic force ends and the reach of human enterprise begins. Lucy R. Lippard contributes an essay, framing the work against what she calls willful amnesia. Her presence is that of a writer and critic, not a photographer; the photographs are Belanger’s throughout.
The book’s making is unusually deliberate. Its 112 pages carry forty-eight color images, including two separate fold-out portfolios, a structure that lets the two bodies of work be read independently and against each other. The pairing is a sequencing decision as much as a conceptual one, and the fold-outs give the contrasts room to unfold rather than resolve. Radius Books has treated the material with the seriousness its subject demands.
For a collector, the interest lies in that conjunction of idea and object. Belanger photographs places where the earth’s slow violence is registered in ordinary scenery, and she has built a book whose form argues the case. It belongs with landscape photography that treats the ground as evidence: unsettled, contested, and only apparently stable.
