Aaron Rothman, The Sierra, 2025

The Sierra revisits the Sierra Nevada mountains through the context of today’s climate crisis, a landscape that has long shaped American ideas of wilderness. Combining large-format film with digital post-production, Aaron Rothman (US) created this body of around fifty colour images over six years. The work seeks to evoke the physical experience of being in the mountains while registering the environmental changes reshaping the region, and places itself in dialogue with the long history of landscape representation.

The Sierra Nevada holds personal significance for Rothman, inspiring a lifelong connection to nature and leading him to take up photography as a teenager. However, his recent visits have been marked by a growing sense of dread and loss as signs of climate change, such as forest fires and haze, become increasingly visible. This evolving relationship informs the project’s core aim: to capture the contradictions of being in a changing landscape, where personal attachment meets environmental uncertainty.

Rothman works in an iterative process split between fieldwork and digital editing. In the field, he makes large-format photographs in response to meaningful natural encounters, such as the immeasurable sense of space evinced by a distant mountain peak, the sheltering confines of a copse of trees at dusk, or the devastation of a recently charred section of forest. In the studio, he determines their final form. Some images remain as they were, others are transformed by inverting colours, layering multiple views of a single place, or washing out an image to the edge of visibility. These interventions aim to unsettle the viewer, creating imagery that feels both familiar and strange.

The European landscape tradition – from Jacob van Ruisdael and Théodore Rousseau to Albert Bierstadt – serves as a reference point, prompting reflection on how traditional representations have shaped our perception of wilderness, and how idealising it as pristine may have contributed to its present vulnerability.

Ultimately, The Sierra challenges the icon it depicts: a landscape both majestic and fragile. It invites us to reimagine environmental realities and our relation to nature – not as something separate or untouched, but as an evolving space intertwined with human impact. And to confront that duality through images that are at once beautiful and unsettling.

Including an accompanying text by renowned art critic and writer Leah Ollman.