Blue Mesa, Arizona

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In the 1970s, Michael Smith traveled the scenic highways of the Western United States in an old firetruck, taking pictures along the way. Smith’s horizontal images abstract the iconic geological forms he photographs, obscuring his subjects by rendering them as pure patterns. Here, the camera compresses the mudstone striations of the Petrified Forest National Park’s Blue Mesa. “… I move the camera around, the world comes and goes flattening itself into pictures,” Smith writes. “Wondrous transformations often occur—small details can appear as landscapes and vast landscapes are sometimes diminished.”

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