In 2020, facing an uncertain future with the new reality of COVID, my young family and I packed up from Portland, Oregon to embark on a year-long journey in a travel trailer. Allowing for isolation and quaranteening, this opportunity gave us a chance to safely visit family across the country. Documenting the journeys between Oregon and our families’ homes in Texas, I captured the moments of a 48,000 mile roadtrip.

Delaney Allen is an American photographer known for his surreal landscape and still life photography. Influenced by painting and sculpture, he creates a unique visual language both inside and out of the studio. Implementing light, color, texture, form and craft he captures and builds uncommon, poetic imagery navigating the space between artificial and natural worlds. He has shown nationally and internationally and his first monograph, “Between Here and There,” sits in collections worldwide. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas.

The role of nature in our human world has become one of the defining issues as the climate crisis tightens its grip. Parks are designed nature that reflect our desires, ideas, and understanding of both ourselves and the environment. Hunter’s Point South Park explores this reality through its constructed tidal marsh invoking the precolonial ecology of the East River tidal estuary, decaying industrial pier pilings, and our current need for entertainment and green space for our mental and physical health.

It is a microcosm of New York City—and humanity—with its fractured palimpsest of the past undergirding our current struggles to understand the world we are constructing. Doherty’s work asks us to see the roles of manufactured nature and how we value it. Are parks merely a real estate amenity or are they an integral part of our humanity and nature itself?

Barrett Doherty is the owner of Barrett Doherty Images, which specializes in landscape architecture photography. Barrett is the recipient of numerous international awards and he collaborates with world-famous designers to realize their vision of their built projects. His work has been published in Architectural Digest, The Architect’s Newspaper, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and numerous other books and publications.

Previously, Barrett was the visual content director at The Cultural Landscape Foundation, where he was responsible for photography and videography for the award-winning organization. Barrett holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Inspired by American Slave Narratives and Black Folklore that involve the crossing of water, One More River to Cross addresses America’s enduring legacies of colonialism and systemic racism, while reiterating the central narrative that emerges from the referenced memoirs – the ongoing struggle for Freedom. Evoking elements from these stories in combination with aquatic landscapes, I contemplate the contemporary state sanctioned violence that persists against Black communities, the approval of this violence by the general public (in the form of unsolicited advice on how Black people should “exist” in order not to be terrorized) and the absence of justice in response to these crimes.

The incarnation of the recently departed, civil rights martyrs, Freedmen and the formerly enslaved summon the spirit of resistance in the aquatic landscapes. This work claims the significant contributions and sacrifices that our ancestors gave civilization in both life and in death and acknowledges the burden of social constructs that to this day continue to threaten people of color. Drawing strength from our sacred texts and spiritual music, this series is about a Black experience that is deeply connected to the landscape, the idea of home and its intersections with water. Water becomes symbolic of Freedom whether it is in this world or the next and simultaneously is evidence of social and cultural boundaries. Water has to be crossed on the journey to Freedom.

Daesha Devón Harris is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work probes the interstices of narrative, history, the politics of place, and the greater African Diaspora, intertwined with photography, mixed media, text, and video. The gentrification of her hometown of Saratoga Springs in New York, and its effect on the local Black community, has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork.

Harris holds a BFA in Studio Art from the College of Saint Rose, and a MFA in Visual Art from the University at Buffalo, and her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Harris has received various awards, honors, and fellowships, and her work has been featured in a number of publications and books. Harris was a grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship; a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellow in Photography; and has participated in artist residencies across the country including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Yaddo; and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. A Senior Visiting Fellow at Skidmore College’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) Storyteller’s Institute, she was named as one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines.

New Town explores the relationship between human aspiration and ecosystem, and our capital imbalance with nature-as-resource. This is a story spun along Newtown Creek, a four-mile estuary and Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site separating Brooklyn from Queens, blocks from where I lived for close to a decade. Once a fertile stream, channelization for commercial port traffic made it one of the most utilized—and polluted—industrial sites in the United States. Here, ecology meets manufacturing, oil refineries and spills, waste transfer and metal scrapping, placemaking and remediation, and—with a new wave of urban development—the loaded promise of renewal.

Working between genres of magical realism and ecological noir, I seek visual expressions of the uncanny to raise questions about a familiar future. Though these pictures were made at a particular location, this story is not site-specific. New Town is our town— an enmeshed cosmos where everything coexists, where permanent plastics swim with the fish, where humanity produces to consume and humans consume to live, and beauty remains in the unviable breakdown.

Elise Kirk is a photofilmic artist and educator concerned with human nature in an ecological world, and the ways in which we construct ourselves through our environments. She was raised in middle-Missouri, studied film at Columbia College Chicago and on a U.S. Fulbright award in Madrid, and completed her MFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked for a decade as a media producer in New York and Washington, D.C. for clients including National Geographic, Discovery, and VICE, leading to a post-documentary approach in her own practice. Elise has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts

in Nebraska, and the U.S. National Park Service. She is currently based in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Kansas. Her work has shown nationally and internationally.

Bound Species draws comparisons to the work of past masters such as Karl Blossfeldt, whose early depictions of locally found specimens continue to inspire artists and designers around the world, celebrating nature’s patterns, structures and intricate beauty. Also more contemporary conceptual artists like Joan Fontcuberta, whose playful interventions and creations with wildlife and fauna explore similar themes.

Jennifer Latour began creating her species in her studio during the first lockdown back in 2020. She uses her skills as a special effects makeup artist to construct ‘new species’ of plants from locally sourced fresh flowers and plants. Each piece is its own delicate and surreal creature, a beautiful Frankenstein of sorts.

While each piece has a unique character and stands on its own, the series as a whole is evocative of the interconnectedness found in nature, and serves as a reminder that all creatures are bound simultaneously by both their similarities and their differences.

Jennifer Latour was born in Seven Islands, Quebec, and now works and lives in Vancouver, BC. She is a self-taught artist who has worked internationally in special effects makeup for film and television since 2003 and began practicing photography in 2006. Her love for photography, cinema, sculpture, and creating characters runs through all her work, and has heavily influenced her Bound Species series.

In an era of AI and sophisticated digital tools, one of the most impressive elements of Jennifer’s practice is that each species is created by hand. These temporary organic sculptures she then photographs in her studio, or sometimes after releasing them back into the wild.

“I keep coming back to water scenes. I keep coming back to rivers and lakes. I keep coming back to oceans. I like to explore the interaction of people with water. Water can disarm even the most armed of facades. Becoming one with water is not about rushing but rather about flowing. And flowing is the closest thing to being.”

This large ongoing body of work has taken me through different corners of the world on an aquatic pilgrimage, from the cold waters of Scandinavia to the pink rivers of Senegal. In these versatile waters, I have captured men, women, siblings, people living with albinism, and non-binary beings. Disarming and dismantling traditional notions of masculinity, facades of masculinity, is something I am devoted to.

Through my images, I aim to showcase people through a more sensible and sensitive lens, one that shows nuance, vulnerability, and movement.

This series is the foundation of my first monograph titled “AGUA.”

Denisse Ariana Pérez is a Barcelona-based multidisciplinary commercial artist working as a photographer, film director, and copywriter. Her work focuses on people, nature, gender, culture, and words and how they all interact with one another. It finds itself between the intersection of fantasy and reality, art and social commentary.

Denisse’s works have been featured in publications such as Dazed, It’s Nice That, i-D, VOGUE Italia, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, Atmos, Marie Claire, El Pais, Elephant Magazine, VICE, Paper Journal, Another Magazine, Hunger, and Ignant, and exhibited at Fotografiska New York/Stockholm, Fotografia Europea, Photo London, and Photo Australia.