The Wounded Earth

This photograph signifies a great deal about what an edit can do for a scene. I was drawn to the angles of this truck and knew it would work in black and white, but the color edit is far more personal to me.

This was an untouched meadow, lined with a dense row of tall pines along a road I travel frequently. The trees are gone now, and the meadow has been carved and sculpted for a vast sea of townhomes and condominiums. There’s an emptiness to driving past it now.

The grainy, desaturated edit carries that feeling by design. Desaturation drains vitality from the image the way construction drained life from this land. The grain adds distance, unease, the sense of memory and loss, as though what you’re seeing is already receding into the past. Together they produce a kind of dystopian melancholy, an elegy disguised as a photograph.

Destruction through construction.

The truck commands attention with its size, geometry and cold industrial confidence. But what I see most is what is lost in the black and white edit – that huge, rugged tire pressing down into the wounded earth where something green and living used to be.