art beat / By Katherine Almy

Exclusion Zone

John Mahony’s disturbing photography

(Feb. 14, 2008)  One of the most challenging shows you’ll see around town right now is John Mahony’s photography at the First Street Gallery. As a river kayaker, Mahony is witness to the increasingly evident fact that there are few wild spaces left on the planet that are untouched by humanity. “You rarely go on a river without seeing some evidence that people have been there, no matter how remote,” he told me. Abandoned railroad ties and cars, culverts, mines and old mining equipment — those are just some of the things you can find along the riverbanks.

His first reaction was what you might expect — outrage and disgust at finding the pristine landscape defiled. But upon further reflection, he says “I started realizing that these abandoned cars were being sculpted by the river and they were really quite beautiful. That put the question in my mind, ‘Why is something beautiful; why is something ugly?’” And so, as part of what he terms “personal research,” he began photographing the landscapes of impacted, damaged wild places.

‘Clorox, Nevada 2005’ by John Mahony.

GALLERY >

Some of the sites he has photographed include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine, the Hanford Nuclear Preserve in Washington State, the Salton Sea in California, abandoned mining sites, and military aircraft crash sites. Placed in these sites, in choreographed poses, are one or more figures, either costumed or nude.<

When the figures are clothed, Mahony uses bridal dresses or ball gowns for the women, and formal dark pants and white shirts for the men. Sometimes the figures have incomplete “hazmat” suits thrown loosely over the party attire. The photographs are more like movie stills then snap shots, in that they are windows into a story.

So going back to Mahony’s question, are these images beautiful? Are they disturbing? If so, why are they disturbing? What are the implications of these badly damaged sites?

The answer to the first question is that some of them most definitely are beautiful. The lighting, the poses and the landscape have all been considered in producing a beautiful image. Some of them are more intriguing and mysterious than beautiful. And all of them are disturbing.

In a picture he took last year called “Burning Field, Salton Sea, California,” a dark woman in a white bridal gown walks away from the camera toward an uncontrolled fire. One of the shoulder straps of her dress has slipped down her arm. She carries her veil in her hand and it drags on the parched ground at her side. The text next to the image tells us about this human-made catastrophe and the devastating results that will ensue when the whole thing evaporates. “As the lake shrinks, the dependable desert winds are expected to blow and to drive lake deposits into the atmosphere. This toxic cloud of salt, selenium, pesticides, heavy metals and petroleum based fertilizers will rise into the atmosphere and create… a California Exclusion Zone.” Oops.

But there is no clear evidence that all of this damage we’re doing is more than a minor nuisance to the planet. Just another upheaval in what’s been a pretty dynamic history from the get go. These images, if anything, indicate that the planet will absorb the trash, repair the damage, get on with it. It will take some time, but the planet has time. As I once heard George Carlin say, years ago, in a live performance, “The Earth is fine… the people are fucked.”

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