Amber Crabbe

I Dreamed We Could Stand Still

When the world we live in has been so thoroughly explored and documented, where can I find someplace unmapped, something truly unknowable? This question drives my photographic practice and draws me to dynamic natural environments such as volcanic areas, geothermal pools, glacial streams, and vast bodies of water. The resistance to human manipulation and persistent resilience of these areas especially compels me. While it’s possible to build a boardwalk across a steaming hot spring or have a vessel break ice to aid passage through near-frozen waters, the elements seldom remain constrained. Lava retakes roadways, salt water slowly rots ships’ hulls, and storm surges overwhelm seawalls. Although making a photograph inherently records a specific place and time, the pace at which these landscapes reinvent themselves provides a deep well of inspiration for me. Returning over and over again, I witness their flow and shift and churn and steam over a period of milliseconds, minutes and years. I instinctively want to isolate and still the chaos, to break it down into texture, color, lines, and geometry. I seek to reimagine these fluctuating landscapes and attempt to transform them into something familiar, to recognize them in a way, even if I will never truly know them.