Rift / Fault


  • Photographer
    Marion Belanger
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention

All photographs were made on film, and scanned to make digital C-Prints. Rift 55, 2011 Laugardalur Pool, Reykjavik, Iceland. Rift 51, 2011 A fish farm in Southern Reykjanes, Iceland. Fault 36, 2012 An empty lot in Desert Hot Springs, California. Fault 23, 2012 A neighborhood overlooking San Bernardino, California. Fault 31, 2012 Lot at Blue Cut, Cajone Pass, California.

Story

Rift/Fault is photographic study of the land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate.

Rift references the eastern edge of the North American Continental Plate where it meets the Eurasian Plate, along the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. Due to the western movement of the North American Plate relative to the Eurasian Plate, new crust is formed as magma pushes up from the mantle. The land along the Rift is unstable and raw. My images portray pipes that carry steam for geothermal electricity, hot pools, volcanic remnants, homes along the Ridge, and the raw, empty landscape.

Fault is a study of the shifting western edge of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault in California. I am interested in the visual traces (or not) of the tectonic plate edge as well as in the artifacts of our built environment upon these edges. I photographed housing developments, wind turbines, earthquake monitors, and the geologic fact of the Fault itself. While the San Andreas Fault is characterized by earthquake activity, the landscape is often striking in its visual normalcy; the ordered built environment seems to ignore the actuality of the land.

Rift /Fault portrays moments of quiet anticipation in settings that shift between the wild and the contained, the fertile and the barren, the geologic and the human. The dichotomy creates a visual tension that questions the uneasy relationship between geologic force and the limits of human intervention.


You can create multiple entries, and pay for them at the same time.
Just go to your History, and select multiple entries that you would like to pay for.