210 Feet Below Sea Level
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.
Artwork Details
- Title: 210 Feet Below Sea Level
- Artist: Liz Deschenes (American, born 1966)
- Maker: Mounted by Laumont Studio
- Date: 1999
- Medium: Chromogenic print
- Dimensions: Image: 91.4 x 116.8 cm (36 x 46 in.)
Frame: 44 × 54 × 4 in. (111.8 × 137.2 × 10.2 cm), approximately - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Gift of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, 2002
- Object Number: 2002.247
- Rights and Reproduction: © Liz Deschenes
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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