Jennifer Steensma Hoag

In Compromised Beauty photographs of beautiful landscapes are complicated by the inclusion of workers in bright yellow Hazmat suits, suggesting environmental contamination from which the worker needs to be protected. In this series I explore the correlation between environmental beauty and perceived environmental health, and the impact of humans on the environment. While photography has been used to document and aestheticize the landscape, digital photography is also used to project what the future may be like. My photographs are fictions that combine a directorial approach to image making with a modernist photographic landscape aesthetic. Multiple photographs of my model are taken on location, and at times the images are digitally combined to suggest many figures present at the site. Because the circumstances depicted are ambiguous and the beautiful environment provides no clues to why the setting is inhospitable, the viewer is left to reconcile an unsettling narrative.