In the series Natural Encounters, I examine the frictional space between the ways humans manipulate nature and how nature constructs itself. While exploring the visual opposition between the synthetic and the natural, the images demonstrate the two halves of a false dilemma. I do not simply depict the dichotomy of man-made and the wild, but rather work to illuminate the liminal spaces where artificial objects occupy the same realm as the natural world. By demonstrating that in order to represent the wild you have to alter it in some way, even if just by photographing it, the series calls into question the notion of a truly natural world. Natural Encounters works to explore man and nature’s inescapable tendency to interact.
All images ©Max J. Marshall