Stanford University in California is the birthplace of countless household names of modern technology. The likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google from one of the university’s dormitories, the founders of Instagram met on campus, graduates include Peter Thiel of Paypal and Palantir as well as the founders of LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Snapchat. Even egomaniac right-wing loony Elon Musk started and convicted blood-testing tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes both started studies at Stanford before dropping out.

We are increasingly told that the companies that were born from this culture will bring salvation to humanity and the planet. Arguably however, their impact is more felt by altering election outcomes, supporting Israeli aggression, distracting a generation with the attention economy, creating an AI to destroy creativity, and heralding leaders who throw fascist salutes on US political stages. Increasingly it seems, the romantic hopes for technology are not felt far outside Palo Alto. When it comes to the environment, technological advances from the likes of solar cells and energy storage are more than offset by the impact of raw consumption, lithium mining, and local to international inequalities more deeply embedded by the libertarian-to-right-wing political agenda big tech has been supporting.




An exhibition mounted in the heart of Stanford University, where so much of the threat to the modern world was and is designed, brings those environmental fears violently present. Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is more than an exhibition of photography from the end of the world, the kind of disaster-lust ‘toggerism that broadsheets and photo awards love to celebrate, but ultimately perhaps acts only as momentary decoration or distraction for those of us less impacted by climate breakdown. Curated by Jessica May and Marshall N. Price, it’s a richly presented exhibition exploring the Anthropocene through contemporary photographic practice by some 44 artists, including installation, sculpture, performance, and also (some very good) straight, trad photography.




It opens with two works mounted outside the gallery entrance: an untitled 2015 work by Andrew Esiebo, covering a wall with vinyl print, captures the urban terrain under a Lagos raised motorway, now a detritus-strewn desolate space in which kids play football, at a scale placing the viewer into their game; and Gideon Mendel’s prints of two couples standing waist-deep in water, a mother and daughter in Bangkok and a middle-aged couple outside London, both violently impacted by flooding, presentedon images on tenterhooked canvas as if to imbue even more anxiety to their situations.

The large show is broken into themes, with the opening Reconfiguring Nature centred by two Letha Wilson photographic sculptures on plinths. Photographed details of US national parks are printed onto steel sheets, which the artist then meticulously folds and pierces to create new conjunctions. Sited where picturesque meets Carl Andre, it perhaps speaks to the industrialised, contorted view that the Trump administration holds of such ecological territories.




We wrote about Noémie Goudal back in 2022 (see 00016), her career since rising as quickly as global temperatures, and a nearby work presents her trademark framing and returning natural views. In Les Mécaniques I – III (2016). We see nature in all its glory, but as with the national parks of Wilson’s work, no nature untainted by humanity, and Goudal’s interest in that duality between a distant timelessness of its roots and potential, coupled with the fact humanity has framed, ordered, protected, managed, and also destroyed such settings.

On the opposite wall, another artist we have previously featured, Todd Gray (see 00090), an artist who clashes and overlaps histories, geographies, personal stories, and global experiences. His four bespoke frames force the viewer into turning their eyes and mind 360° to contend with layering colonial design with local nature, distant galaxies with intimate proximity. Nearby, Elana Damiani’s photograph is printed on silk chiffon, a delicate material to hold the weight of a mountain. From her series positioning found archive prints in a manner to question the picturesque and ideas of ancient time interrupted by the brief period of humanity, the solid appears temporary, the monolithic fragile.




In the following Toxic Sublime section, space is afforded to Edward Burtynsky and his 2017 photograph of lithium mines in the Atacama Desert, Chile. It acts as reminder of dislocation, that a dream future for the Global North fuelled by electronic batteries – whether for pleasure or for transport and functions avoiding fossil fuels – is still one that impacts the health of people and place, just at a far-remove from the place of benefit. Next to it in the corner is João Castilho’s red-hued arrangement of images of Morro Vermelho in Brazil, a vegetation-free summit overlooking the Estrada Real, a road central to Portuguese colonial control, connecting the region’s 800 mines to a route ultimately headed back to Europe. Castilho’s photographs flood the landscape in a golden-hour blood-redness, washing together sacred, secular, present, past, indigenous, and imperial – reminding us that the Burtynksy’s landscape is nothing new, but is rooted in colonial systems upon people and place.

Two Adrián Balseca photographs from the Ecuadorian’s Horamen series play less with ideas of the sublime. His images are of tolas, earthen mounds that form part of pre-Columbian culture that thrived from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. as spaces of religious practice and burial. The people were skilled at crafting with gold, silver, and platinum, creating works that were also buried inside the tola mounds. Not only have the tolas been excavated and extracted since – predominantly by Italian entrepreneur Donato Yannuzzelli in the 1930s, while some of the ‘discovered’ gold is now incorporated into Ecuador’s national gold bars – but so too has the memory and heritage of the ancient civilisation that they were a product of. Balseca burns holes into the images, puncturing not only the pictoral representation of place, but rendering evidence of indiginous history into darkness.

If Balseca interrupts the fourth wall of the photographic image, penetrating the visual clarity of a landscape view with a conceptual presence, then Matthew Brandt’s Vatnajökull YCM17 goes many steps further in the destruction of a photographic truth towards a more meaningful understanding of place. Brandt’s photographs of Vatna Glacier, the largest icecap in Iceland, were manipulated with fire and heat, breaking up the chemistry and materials. Carefully separating the coloured layers that, together, formed a beautiful image of the glacier, he then pressed them back together into a glitched, distorted, and altogether more horrifying render – though perhaps one that speaks to the situation more truthfully.





The third section, Inhuman Geographies, draws on more traditional documentary photography with a series of works that speak to the situation for many people and places coping in a changing climate. Dhruv Malhotra’s captures two homeless sleepers, wrapped tightly in linen as if they are two body bags, laid upon a manicured, well-watered grass under a sky saturated with artificial lighting. Similar questions around values and landscape are presented in Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong’s image of Xinjiekou, Xuanwu District, Nanjing, a scene of rapid demolition and towering growth. No humans are present in the image, though they are present in the story it conjures, one where the speed of architectural change is quicker than one the human condition might cope with.

There are also no humans clearly present in Pablo López Luz’s two aerial images, one looking across Mexico City, the other Calexico on the Mexico/USA border. In both, scale and vantage flatten urban form into landscape – one an undulating topology, the other a flat and geometric grid. They both remind that however all encompassing, grandiose, and permanent mankind’s layer upon the earth is – and Mexico City rolls on far beyond the frame of the image – it still feels temporary, that the skin of the earth is so delicate, and our place upon it so precarious.




A future of both utopian and dystopian potential is presented in the final section, Envisaging Tomorrow. Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad collaborate on image making – Warli artist Vangad drawing over Gill’s images to create a compressed landscape rendering, one that speaks to both that which is physically present and aspects that can’t be seen by the camera, but exist in the mind, culture, and history. Speaking to a future that recognises landscapes and places that honour and allow complex histories to be present – rather than flattened into a singular truth as both much politics and image making seeks to do.

Laura McPhee’s large-format image of the White Clouds Mountain forests in Idaho capture the woodlands regrowing and renewing after wildfires three years prior. Second Nature opened a month after vast fires ripped through not only Californian landscapes but also into swathes of Los Angeles, and while McPhee’s image captures how nature works to rebuild stronger – including the floating seeds of fireweed, a plant able to rapidly grow and stabilise soils in burned areas – the expectations that the neoliberal systems that design and build housing in the destroyed parts of LA will be quite so rooted in collaboration, natural approaches, and building a stronger place.

James Casebere’s Orange House On Water may be beautiful, but it is cold. Standing on stilts in a vast lake as Marina Tabassum Khudi Bari homes are designed to survive above raised monsoon waters in Bangladesh, Casebere’s seems to indicate a longing for the American modernist dream in a world in which it can’t be sustained. The artist created the image by building architectural models then photographing them as if in a wider landscape, an approach that gives this de-peopled, sculptural building an uncanny, sinister feeling.




The last, small image in the show is looks directly down upon a small Inuit iceburg. Robert Kautuk captures a scene of violence, though one rooted in indigenous culture and man’s presence in Iglulik, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, northern Canada. Men, some of whom are looking directly up at the drone-mounted camera, are standing in a scene of devastation, with carcasses and blood staining the small ice island. The title, After Cutting Up Two Walruses, Iglulik, states what caused the scene, and it reminds of the overlap and complications of balancing future, past, traditions, survival, mankind, and nature, with unflinching brutality if without answers.

The blood staining the white ice, sitting within the green waters of the Clyde River can easily be read as an abstracted reference to the flag of Palestine – a reminder before stepping out of the gallery any successful future for those able to see this exhibition within the luxurious confines of Standford’s campus must also be one in which those who are at greatest threat of survival in the world’s crises can also not only survive, but thrive. We – rich/poor, North/South, human/non-human – are all intertwined, and the works in Second Nature reminds us of this, as well as the deep embedded politics at play in landscape and representation.




Outside of Cantor Arts Center is a remarkable collection of Rodin sculptures, the largest outside Paris. While some are presented across the classically-arranged quads elsewhere, a large number are situated in a garden outside the Cantor Arts Center, including a 1981 cast of his terrifying, monumental Gates of Hell. Capturing the threat and fear of Dante’s imaginings of the inferno, figures flailing, despair present. Around the garden, nineteen other Rodin characters disrupt the pastoral, academic setting, with anguish, burden, contortion, and fear.

Artists and curators often imply bold claims about ways in which art can change society, politics, or the world. This is rarely the case, and while usually offers critical commentary upon global affairs rarely has the opportunity to directly impact policy, intent, or those who make change. Here, perhaps it could. The wider Stanford campus is immaculate – a manicured bubble of wealth, potential, science, and power. If art has the potential to shock people into reimagining or reshaping the world that is to come – and there is not much art more shocking than both the existential Rodin sculptures and many of the fear-inducing works within Second Nature – then surely it’s here, in a place full of minds creating the systems, algorithms, products, and weapons that will define the coming century.




The future Musks, Thiels, Bezos, and Brins are all here, passing by the Cantor Arts Center en route to their labs, cafés, and dorms. On the day we visited Second Nature, however, the visitors seemed to overwhelmingly be middle-aged daytrippers and intent arts students. Both of which are great, it’s a show that needs to be seen, but culture needs to find a way to not only present difficult truths to those who seek them out, but those like the Stanford techbros who need to be confronted with them. Art should not be comfortable, these environmental works are not comfortable, but there is a risk that they only offer a kind of nodding agreement from those who already knew the score and are doing the little they can to fight the current conditions.

Art has the potential to act as a grit to interject into the ideas developed at Stanford, or even act as a shock-barrier to the entitled, privileged, free-thinking, inequitable world that might otherwise be designed for us. Art has the power to pause minds, invite empathy, ethics, equality, and urgency into thinking – the works in Second Nature might do that if a visit to the exhibition was a compulsory part of the science, technology, computer, and systems courses taking place nearby.