Haze is a photographic project intended to draw attention to obscured and frequently overlooked systems, environments, and practices. Comprised of 35mm stills that were digitally scanned and printed, the work documents smartphone photography in a highly managed and pristine national park. This project asks how smartphone photographic practice shifts one’s experience of natural environments, both immediately and in more sustained ways.
While the photographs attempt to draw the viewer’s focus to an immediate paradox—a natural landscape of mountains, trees, and a lake, foregrounded by cellphone users—they also work to provoke deeper consideration of our natural and built environments. Taken in Banff National Park during a summer clouded by smoke from wildfires in the region, some photographs capture a thick haze that rendered the mountains nearly invisible. Unimpeded by the smoke and low visibility, visitors took snapshots. Both smoke and screens mediate the experience of the landscape—something in the way—while making perceptible environmental and technological systems that extend beyond the photographic frame.
A data centre just 155km from the park appears in a small number of photographs positioned at the periphery of the installation, extending the work’s consideration of smartphone photography beyond the immediate act of taking a picture. How and where do the photographed mountains exist? This question applies both to the individuals taking the snapshots and to the digital, networked and AI systems through which those images are stored, circulated and interpreted.
Haze was produced during the Banff Artist in Residence program during Summer 2026.
