Unnatural World

“Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better-looking place.”
- Banksy

What drives some people to adorn built or natural environments with graffiti, murals, rocks, broken glass, or carvings? Sometimes these expressions add breathtaking beauty or poignancy to an otherwise dull structure such as a train car or a bus. Yet, frequently, they deface rather than improve urban or rural neighborhoods or parks.

The Unnatural World series explores the clash of scenic beauty and the human expressions that simultaneously impede, deface, degrade, and obscure our environment. The series, featuring landscape images shot in Iceland, Death Valley, Yosemite, the Sierras, Big Sur, and San Francisco, evokes a hybrid and surreal visual field where nihilistic expressions of disillusionment offset beauty — both real and imagined.

Inspired by circular design principles, the images employ optical layering to infuse landscapes with images representing the disharmony between nature/humans. — Rusty Weston, San Francisco, 2023