ISABELLA INGENDAHL // Displaced



Displaced



As humanity flourishes, innovates, urbanizes and spreads, we hasten nature’s decline. We fell tree after tree, fill the earth with poisons, and force countless creatures from their homes. The World Wildlife Federation did a study recently revealing that in the last 45 years, an average of 60% of creatures within all populations of vertebrates and 85% within freshwater dwellers have been killed as a direct result of human activity. We take life for granted, and if we continue to treat the world this way it won’t be just nature that we decimate: we will also kill ourselves.

My project is a series of paradoxical photos illustrating the devastating beauty occurring when humanity displaces nature. Half of the images are landscapes, combining vibrant, pollution-filled skies and manmade creations with nature. The other half are of cyanotyped animals on woodblocks, placed in what would have been their natural environments. In creating the images, I looked for a color palette of blues, cyans, yellows, oranges and greens in order to emphasize the wistful joy I feel when thinking about our planet. We lose so much as our species gains ground, growing through the world rather than with it. If nature only exists where we allow it to, soon there won’t be any nature at all.

www.ici-imaging.com