"We live in an age of rising seas" - Rachel Carson
Mother Earth, Mother Sea is a series of digital collages combining my landscape photographs with advertisements and other images cut from Life magazines published in the 1940s–1960s. This time period marks the beginning of American post-war consumerism, which set off a multitude of environmental and cultural harms that still haunt us today. Many of these magazine ads targeted middle-class white women and promised a more convenient, modern life without a thought for the resulting waste and other environmental consequences of mass production. Woven into this push for over-consumption were advertisements featuring personal hygiene and beauty products that claimed to “fix” or subdue women’s natural bodily functions to meet the unrealistic expectations of white femininity at the time.
Generations later, these selling strategies persist at an even higher intensity. I see myself in the women pictured, trapped in the same destructive cycle of consumption-induced self-loathing, wastefulness, and rage as the climate emergency looms. We will most likely continue to adapt (that is what humans do best), but what if we chose a different path, to love the Earth–and ourselves–instead?
