Aerial Images Of Salterns That Blur The Line Between Photograph And Painting

Photographer David Burdeny, whose photo of a towering iceberg we featured last month, has been working on another large-scale photography project. Burdeny began the series SALT: Fields, Plottings and Extracts in 2015, using aerial photography to explore some of the world’s most vibrant salterns in Utah, Mexico, and Australia. Gazing upon the images it’s difficult to determine whether the expressive boxes of color are produced with a camera or paintbrush, or if the gestures were made by hand or nature.

More info: David Burdeny, Instagram, Facebook (h/t: colossal)

“In their use of amorphous shapes, elongated fields of color and vertical, jagged and sinuous lines, Burdeny’s images suggest the painterly expressiveness of Rothko, Still, Newman, Diebenkorn and late career Willem de Kooning,” explains an essay written about the project. “The effect is less intentional than it is available—Modernism’s abstracted reordering of the visual landscape…permits a non-objective reading of these compositions.”