Rock Canyon Bacteria Cultures

One way I decided to capture the true élan of the soul of a location (in this case, Rock Canyon) is by taking bacteria samples and growing cultures from them. I attempted to make the unseen seen, and tried to show even the most minute aspects of this place. If everything in existence--at least everything physical, real and concrete--is made out of atoms, then really all that existence and reality is, and all that places (both inner and outer landscapes) really are is a combination of all of these different atom combining together to create something. This is a part of this idea, I attempted to take the minuscule, unseen aspects of a place (microscopic bacteria) and make it able to be seen by our eyes. It's impossible to actually show atoms, because they are too small and I do not have the access to a scanning tunneling microscope, or any other piece of sophisticated machinery required to properly see the building blocks of all reality.

Unfortunately, this is my first time making bacteria cultures. As a result, I wasn't able to have this project fully communicate my idea. Originally, I was to take samples from the four Classical Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. I took an air sample by opening the petri dish and waving it around for a bit. I took a sample from a fire pit, and from the dirt and from a small pool of water. Unfortunately, I was unable to capture the fire pit sample (although, it looked a lot like the dirt sample). I also did not take in to account exactly how disgusting bacteria cultures are, and that they would make my apartment smell really bad and that I would end up having to quickly snap photos before throwing them away [I ran into a similar problem with my Spiral Jetty cultures, which became so rank and rancid that I was forced to throw them away before I could take a picture].

So, my final images are lacking and somewhat uninteresting, but are a very nice first attempt. Although I haven't yet taken Polaroids of Rock Canyon, I do appreciate the similarities in the process of "developing" a polaroid of a place and "developing" a bacteria culture of a place.

Earth [Rock Canyon, Utah]

Air [Rock Canyon, Utah]

Water [Rock Canyon, Utah]