Ultimate Earth

Colour and landscape dominate the work of David Benjamin Sherry, and Ultimate Earth provides a dazzling example of the photographer’s vision: a grandiose vista of the American West, saturated in alien colour. Shooting only on film, Sherry develops his own photographs in a New York darkroom, and it is there that he achieves the characteristic vibrancy of his images. Taking a sweeping landscape, or a crannied and contoured close-up of a rock formation, he applies a chromatic overlay that infuses the image with one rich hue. In doing so, Sherry creates a hyperreal version of the natural world: at once familiar and pushed beyond our expectations of reality. Here, this effect washes a vivid red across the landscape. This in itself gives the scene an otherworldly quality, and yet it also accentuates the eerie symmetry already present within Sherry’s balanced composition, with the hills at the edges of the picture almost deliberately framing the mountain rising up between them. In this sense, the visual strangeness of the colouring only accentuates the strangeness of the world as we already know it. We observe, as the title suggests, a kind of ultimate earth.