Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California by Ian Baguskas

Good morning collectors! It's Sara today, subbing for Jen as she hits the ground running in San Francisco. I'll jump right in to introduce today's edition, Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California by Ian Baguskas—it's seriously stunning. One of the larger works in Jen Bekman Gallery's winter exhibition Mixtape, Rincon was regularly cause for lingering.

Ian photographed the island as part of his series, Sweet Water, which was exhibited for his NYC solo debut at the JBG back in 2008. For Sweet Water, Ian ventured west, lugging his 4x5 and 6x7 film cameras, as many photographers and explorers have done. But Ian's adventure was informed by a desire to seek out communities created where the resources—most notably water—needed to support them were in scarce supply. He found failed efforts to defy reason and defeat nature—utopias turned anthropological relics—and the now-closed Rincon Island among them.

The resulting images reveal a reverence for space and light and an ability to transform both onto the two-dimensional plane. It's a breathtaking experience to be face to face with the buttery expanse of sea and sky Ian has photographed. It's likewise unsettling; the image is deceptive in its beauty. As Ian notes in his statement, the palm trees and hazy calm disguise an eroding outpost for the extraction and transportation of crude oil.

Rincon is a fitting companion to Robert Adams' Burning Oil Sludge North of Denver, Colorado. Adams hails from the New Topographics' generation of photographers that preceded Ian. Like Ian, Adams spends his time studying the West and its evidence of us. Their images seem to plainly say: look what we've done. They revel in simplicity and that unsettling sense of beauty. What have we done? It's not totally clear that we've acted for the better or for the worse, or at least, where exactly along the way things went awry in our attempts to settle and tame nature. Nor does either photographer suggest solutions or resolutions to undo what's been done. They do provide us with a platform for consideration, to openly look and think, daydream and draw conclusions. As Adams wrote, "The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope."