Jake Longstreth : Tulare

the long version

From 2008 to 2012, often in the dead of summer, American painter Jake Longstreth (born 1977) photographed the dusty, utilitarian Central Valley of California, a severe inland topography formerly occupied by the massive Tulare Lake. With a tonal restraint echoing the style of his own flatly realistic paintings, Longstreth's photographs capture the hazy, blinding sunlight and muted palette of this region, a topography that has been transformed from a lush, wild terrain--celebrated by John Muir in 1868 as 'one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom'--into the monotonously fertile industrial farmland it is today. 'Millions of people pass over the dry lake-bed in their cars every year, unaware of its previous existence, ' Longstreth notes with ambivalent fascination. A Taco Bell now stands roughly where the shores of Tulare Lake once were.