Story at a glance
- After President Trump ordered a review of national monuments across the country in April 2017, photographer David Benjamin Sherry set out to capture these natural places in vivid monochrome.
- Sherry shoots film and manipulates it in an analog darkroom, pushing the colors to their chromatic extremes.
- His new book, “David Benjamin Sherry: American Monuments”, showcases Sherry’s photos along with essays from naturalist activists Terry Tempest Williams and Bill McKibben.
After the death of a close friend, American photographer David Benjamin Sherry ventured alone outdoors. Being alone in the wilderness helped Sherry connect his own understandings of life and death, he says, and “how life and death are interconnected and nature exemplifies this cycle best.”
Sherry continues, “You experience it everywhere you look while hiking — this helped me understand that it’s not just our species, but all species who experience this cycle. It was a freeing experience to begin to understand.”
Under the late-photographer Richard Benson’s guidance during graduate school, Sherry developed a color-printing process around 2007 for his work. He shoots color film and manipulates the color in the analog darkroom. Since there are three colors that make up a photograph—cyan, magenta, and yellow—he can, in the darkroom, push the levels of these colors to their “chromatic extremes.”
“The color and the process became this tool for me to speak to the emotional state and the intensity of that connection I feel towards the natural world,” Sherry says. “It really came from such a personal place.”
About ten years after Sherry developed this color-printing process, President Trump ordered in April 2017 a review of national monuments created since 1996. By December of that year, the Trump administration’s report called for shrinking four national monuments and changing the management of six others. The report raised concerns that millions of preserved public acres would be opened up to commercial activities like oil and gas extraction, mining and logging. Sherry said “it was no question” in his mind: “I was ready to fight alongside other environmentalists and activists, and my artwork at that point took a turn to fully engage the politics I believe in,” he says.
“As soon as I understood that the national monuments were being targeted and could be obliterated for oil, coal and uranium development,” Sherry explains, “I immediately packed the car with my camera and film and set out to immerse myself and photograph these wild and beautiful places.” The result is a stunning book, “David Benjamin Sherry: American Monuments,” which captures through landscape photography “the spirit and intrinsic value of America’s threatened system of national monuments.” Terry Tempest Williams, the author of many environmental literature classics, wrote part of the book’s text, along with environmentalist and author Bill McKibben.
“He’s pushing the form of photography into a more inclusive range, and I think that’s really important with the mythology of the West,” says Williams.
The “mythology of the West” might bring to mind the “Marlboro man up on his horse” or the “rugged individualist.” Yet as Williams points out, the West is “a mosaic of communities.”
“These lands he is photographing — before they were public lands, they were Indian lands. They still are Indian lands,” she says. “We have to remember that.”
In her essay accompanying Sherry’s photographs in “David Benjamin Sherry: American Monuments,” Williams writes, “He asks us to look deeper to engage with the world in a way we have never considered before because the colonization of America has also been the colonization of art … Through heightened attention, he nurtures a more inclusive view of the natural world without the distraction of seeing things as they are, but rather what they might become.”
Sherry’s use of vivid monochrome colors in his work allows us to see American monuments, and nature more broadly, with the intensity we would feel if we were there, squinting from the beaming sunlight in the desert.
“After seeing David’s work, I see the world differently now,” Williams says. “It’s a vibrational essence. There’s an energetic intensity in his work that allows us to see the desert more clearly.”
(Photography by David Benjamin Sherry)
Published on Nov 11,2019