No Other Place to Go
Photography has long occupied a unique position at the intersection of art and evidence, making it one of the most powerful tools for documenting climate change. A medium rooted in observation, photography records environmental transformation—retreating shorelines, altered river systems, industrial intervention, deforestation, and ecological loss—while also translating these changes into visual forms that can be felt as much as they are understood. This exhibition No Other Place to Go considers how photography reflects the psychological weight of climate change, shaped by collective anxiety, grief, and uncertainty. While scientific data defines the scale of impact, photographs give those measurements human and emotional form.
Richard Boutwell’s ongoing series Reclamation: Deadpool examines the dramatic recession of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, as a visible consequence of decades-long megadrought, climate change, and sustained human overuse. Centered on the lake’s striking “bathtub ring”—the 160–180-foot white mineral scar left behind as water levels fall—the work uses this mark as a powerful symbol of the accelerating environmental crisis. Through large-scale photographs and custom elevation maps generated from remote sensing imagery and geographic data, Boutwell connects historical policy decisions to present-day consequences, transforming scientific information into stark visual evidence of a water system under stress—one that continues to sustain millions even as it disappears.
Anita Allyn’s Monument to an Ecosystem positions photography as both representation and intervention. Expanded from cyanotypes into large-scale photographic murals, the works incorporate circular cut-outs that allow viewers to look through the image and into the surrounding environment. This optical shift collapses the boundary between photographed nature and lived space, while the punctured surface acts as a metaphor for human impact on ecosystems. Allyn’s work transforms the photograph from a static document into an active encounter—highlighting photography’s power to frame, alter, and memorialize fragile environments.
Laura Krasnow’s And Then There Were None series uses the material decay of photography to reflect the accelerating loss of the world’s forests. Captured on expired Polaroid film, the images are marked by fading, distortion, and instability—visual metaphors for climate change and the ongoing destruction of forest ecosystems caused by agriculture, urban expansion, mining, and logging. As forests disappear at an alarming rate, these photographs suggest landscapes already slipping into memory. Through a medium that visibly deteriorates over time, Krasnow emphasizes the urgency of preservation and the permanence of ecological loss.
Emma Ressel’s work expands the exhibition’s exploration of photography as both evidence and interpretation by addressing not only visible environmental change, but the psychological and perceptual consequences of climate disruption. While the exhibition foregrounds photography’s ability to record altered landscapes and ecological loss, Ressel’s Glass Eyes Stare Back examines how those changes are normalized over time through the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Her work situates climate change not just in the land itself, but in human memory, perception, and expectation by staging elaborate photographic constructions inspired by museum dioramas, incorporating taxidermied animals and fabricated flora.
Together, these practices exemplify photography’s capacity to show what is happening in a world undergoing rapid climatic and ecological change. By bringing data into dialogue with experience, inviting viewers to see not just what has been lost but why it matters—and how the consequences of climate change ripple through ecosystems and human communities alike. These images affirm that evidence and emotion are not opposing forces, but complementary forms of knowledge—together shaping how environmental realities are seen, remembered, and acted upon.
Anita Allyn
Anita Allyn is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the shifting relationships between photography, landscape, memory, and environmental change. Working across photography, installation, video, and artist books, she investigates how images function not simply as records of the world but as systems that shape what we recognize, remember, and value. Her recent projects explore the landscape as an archive, questioning the ways photographic representation constructs ideas of nature in the Anthropocene. Combining field research with material experimentation, Allyn's installations often transform photographs into sculptural objects, exposing the physical and conceptual structures through which ecological knowledge is produced and preserved.
Allyn has exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally at venues including Tate Modern (London), the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow), the International Photography Biennial Medellín (Colombia), MASS MoCA, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Vox Populi, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has also been presented in exhibitions throughout Europe, including Vienna, Lisbon, and Luxembourg.
Born in Scotland and based in New Jersey, Allyn is Professor of Visual Art at The College of New Jersey, where she teaches photography, video, and critical theory. Her current research focuses on photography, ecology, and archival practices, exploring how photographic images actively construct environmental narratives rather than merely document them.
Artist Statement:
Photography has been understood as a tool for documenting the natural world, yet it also determines how ecosystems are recognized, classified, remembered, and ultimately valued. My practice examines the spaces at which nature intersects with systems of display. I make photographs, installations, and site-specific works, focusing on the ways images circulate alongside archives, museum displays, scientific systems, and public space. Landscape, in this context, is never simply encountered; it is continually constructed through the visual and institutional frameworks that shape how nature is seen.
Research is central to my practice. Drawing from environmental history, photography, museum display, and material culture, I investigate how photography, collection, and exhibition shape ecological knowledge. Moving between documentation and fiction, my work questions photography's authority while asking how images shape what we recognize, preserve, and ultimately value as nature.
Richard Boutwell
Richard Boutwell, originally from Joshua Tree, California, is a photographer and print-maker based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His work is based around aspects of archaeology, family history and myth, and the influence of spirituality, technology, and social media on how we interact with the natural environment. Through it, he examines his personal connection to the greater cultural, industrial, and environmental history of the landscape—mostly involving issues of water rights and the impact of recreation in the desert landscapes of the Southwest. In addition to his traditional landscape photography, he is now combining his photographs with 3D scans of the environment, found objects, historical materials, and appropriated mapping and scientific data.
Boutwell began photographing in college in the year 2000 while studying music and pursuing a career as a jazz bassist. Shortly into his first darkroom course and being exposed to the beauty and creative possibilities of fine-art photographs, he dropped all his music classes and devoted himself to studying the history and craft of photography. Instead of pursuing a formal fine-arts degree, he relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to enter an intensive long-term apprenticeship with the photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee. He worked as their darkroom, studio, and field assistant from 2002 until 2008, and then became their full-time printer and ran the scanning and digital studio at their photography book publishing company, Lodima Press, until 2015.
In balance with his family life and fine-art practice, he teaches photography and fine-art printing privately through https:/www.bwmastery.com. Boutwell also created specialized software that helped advance the craft of digital black-and-white and historic-process printing now used by photographers worldwide.
His photographs have been included in national and international group exhibitions and are in private and public collections. He has served as a guest lecturer on the history of landscape photography at mid-Atlantic colleges and universities.
Kaitlin Pomerantz
Kaitlin Pomerantz (she, they) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Philadelphia and New York. Pomerantz works across forms with purposeful materials to pose questions about ecological relations under extractive systems, land use an mis-use, consumption and discard, materials, and the way people and places create one another.
Pomerantz’s work has been supported by Monument Lab, Pew Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia Mural Arts, Sachs Arts and Innovation and other cultural organizations and foundations. They have most recently shown work at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Buoy Gallery in Maine and Automat in Philadelphia. Pomerantz has recently held residencies at Surf Point (Maine), the Church (Sag Harbor, NY) and Officina Stamperia Notaio (IT). Pomerantz is a recent recipient of a Leeway Foundation Art + Change grant.
Pomerantz is a critic in the interdisciplinary MFA program at the School of Visual Arts and a lecturer in Fine Arts and Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Pomerantz holds a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Interdisciplinary Art and an ED. M From Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Pomerantz is the founder of MATTERS, an educational initiative connecting art and design materials to labor and land, supporting creative practices rooted in awareness, repair and care.
Pomerantz also curates exhibitions, writes and tends to oysters.
Laura Krasnow
Laura Krasnow, born in New York City, has lived and traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia.
In addition to being a freelance photographer, she has worked as an assistant editor in feature films, and been trained in film preservation and restoration. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, and The Brooklyn Museum.
Her passion is art, science and technology. After obtaining an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to school to study math, physics and computer science. Laura has attended seminars at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, and the Centre for Brain and Mind, both in Canada.
Emma Ressel
Emma Ressel is an artist and researcher from Bar Harbor, Maine working with large format film photography, re-photography, and archives. Her current work with natural history collections examines how we describe nature to ourselves over vast timescales.
Emma received her BA in Photography at Bard College and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. Her MFA thesis project, Extant Erosions, has been exhibited in solo shows at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and at the Houston Center for Photography, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize. An installation of the work was also included in the group show Photography and Excess at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Emma has published three books, Olives in the street in 2017, Glass Eyes Stare Back, self-published in 2024, and Extant Erosions in 2025. She is a cofounder of Printer Jam, a book arts collective and production studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Emma is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Regional Studies at the University of New Mexico, where she is conducting research into photographic slide archives at science and history museums throughout the state of New Mexico. She lives and works in Albuquerque.
