Expected Image
Photographs
2024
The photographs here are part of a larger project examining the entanglement of land management and visual representation, particularly through the Bureau of Land Management's Visual Resource Management System (VRM). The VRM System borrows concepts from art history, landscape architecture, and visual studies to determine the "scenic or visual values" of America's public lands.¹ These values inform how public land and its attendant natural resources are apportioned, conserved, and exploited.
The VRM System produces and maintains a sanitized and duplicitous image of the American Western landscape—propping up a nationalist mythology of America's public lands as open and pristine while obscuring a vast network of extraction sites operated by multinational mining and energy corporations. The system, established on the tenets of visual theory, permits these operations to exist on public land by making them invisible through camouflage techniques² or strategic remoteness from "key observation points," e.g., roads, hiking trails, etc.³
Between 2018 and 2023, the collective met in the field biannually to perform a series of faithful and fanciful reinterpretations of VRM System survey procedures found in the innumerable handbooks and documents produced by the Bureau.⁴ These visual constructions underscore the lengths the BLM has gone to manufacture a version of the landscape that consistently, but precariously, aligns with a viewer's expected image, revealing what is hidden while reclaiming the mechanisms of concealment.
¹ Visual Resource Management Program
² BLM Tehnical Note 446—The Use of Color for Camouflage Concealment of Facilities
³ BLM Manual 8431—Visual Resource Contrast Rating
⁴ See Visual Impacts project Expected Image
Photographs
2024
The photographs here are part of a larger project examining the entanglement of land management and visual representation, particularly through the Bureau of Land Management's Visual Resource Management System (VRM). The VRM System borrows concepts from art history, landscape architecture, and visual studies to determine the "scenic or visual values" of America's public lands.¹ These values inform how public land and its attendant natural resources are apportioned, conserved, and exploited.
The VRM System produces and maintains a sanitized and duplicitous image of the American Western landscape—propping up a nationalist mythology of America's public lands as open and pristine while obscuring a vast network of extraction sites operated by multinational mining and energy corporations. The system, established on the tenets of visual theory, permits these operations to exist on public land by making them invisible through camouflage techniques² or strategic remoteness from "key observation points," e.g., roads, hiking trails, etc.³
Between 2018 and 2023, the collective met in the field biannually to perform a series of faithful and fanciful reinterpretations of VRM System survey procedures found in the innumerable handbooks and documents produced by the Bureau.⁴ These visual constructions underscore the lengths the BLM has gone to manufacture a version of the landscape that consistently, but precariously, aligns with a viewer's expected image, revealing what is hidden while reclaiming the mechanisms of concealment.
¹ Visual Resource Management Program
² BLM Tehnical Note 446—The Use of Color for Camouflage Concealment of Facilities
³ BLM Manual 8431—Visual Resource Contrast Rating
⁴ See Visual Impacts project