Title

Barry Underwood is a Cleveland-based photographer. His creative practice stands at the intersection of staged photography, land art, and minimalist sculpture. His work illuminates environments that hold rich ecological and cultural histories and are sites of destructive human behavior. By building and photographing sculptures of light, Underwood elucidates the ways humans intervene in the natural environment while highlighting how society normalizes these exploitations. His work makes visible the cultural constructs of wilderness and, by extension, the environmental issues related to human use and abuse of natural resources. Each of Underwood's photographs begins with many hours of location search, talking with community members, learning the place's ecological and social histories, and studying satellite imagery. He also visits tourist sites and science centers to gather documented narratives while spending considerable time in the environment, watching, listening, and exploring. His goal is to learn how humans, past, and present, engage with a particular site and, more broadly, the land itself. Through these investigations, Underwood has come to understand that landscape contains rich layers of information, providing for different types of storytelling.