210 Feet Below Sea Level

Liz Deschenes|Laumont Studio

1999 · Chromogenic print · Photographs

Deschenes’s work probes the nature of photography, challenging assumptions about the medium’s relationship to reality and to visual and spatial perception. This image is from the artist’s series of salt flats, badlands, and canyons, exhibited together in 1999 under the title Below Sea Level—an extended exploration of some of the lowest elevations in the Western Hemisphere. Here, Deschenes shot a primordial expanse of Death Valley from a low angle, leaving a thin strip of blue sky visible above the high horizon line. The picture oscillates between what we know it to be—an arid stretch of barren, aboveground terrain—and what it resembles: an underwater landscape.

Artist

Liz Deschenes|Laumont Studio

Date

1999

Medium

Chromogenic print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, 2002