Hosted by Link Gallery & Workshop

This land is Your Land. This land is the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument - 1.8 million acres held within the public domain in southern Utah. These photographs are a momentary account of this land; impressions of landscape, space, and time that visualize the presence of light and perspective parallel to experienced reality. They are pinhole photographs that capture a 360 degree view - a distorted panorama of overlapping impressions in which vantage point is eliminated and yet emphasized.

This land is remarkable. It reveals a layered history - geologic, paleontological, and cultural - exposing an unfathomable expanse of time. This series of pinhole photographs aims to record a more immediate experience. Designed specifically for this landscape, the camera is placed directly on the ground, exposing the richness of desert life found mainly at a scale below the knee. Unexpectedly, it captures an astounding range of view from immediate foreground to the far off distance. Scale is amplified. Perspective is shifted. The results are simple atmospheric gradations of light that become place and no-place at the same time. Yet these photographic impressions are deeply rooted to their place, recording a brief moment in time of an eternally shifting landscape.

Meghan Duda creates atmospheric recordings of space and time with a collection of handmade pinhole cameras. After earning her bachelor degree in Architecture from Virginia Tech in 2005 she began traveling the country, developing a practice photographing vernacular architecture. Born in western Massachusetts and raised on the South Carolina coast, she finally settled in Fargo, North Dakota in 2007 and was struck by the vast prairie landscape. At this point her photographic focus shifted from architectural photography to experimental landscape photography. It was while pursuing an MFA at the University of North Dakota that she built her first handmade camera which she named the Trailer Obscura - a 5’ x 8’ pinhole camera on wheels that she uses to make large atmospheric recordings of the prairie. Duda continues to construct cameras as a way to explore vantage point and perspective and to express the many ways in which the camera perceives light.