- Artist or Maker
- Metabolic Studio
Based in Los Angeles, California, established 2005 - Title
- One Hundred Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct: Centenary of the Opening of the Cascades November 5, 2013
- Date Made
- 2013
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions
- Image: 42 × 105 in. (106.68 × 266.7 cm)
Primary support: 42 × 106 in. (106.68 × 269.24 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2016.8
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
Lauren Bon leads a team of individuals under the name Metabolic Studio that works on site-specific projects investigating land and water use in the Intermountain West, from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada. Based alongside the Los Angeles River, the studio has two branches: the Optics Division, which focuses on photography and its related alchemy, and the Sonic Division, which manipulates sound in the landscape. In 2013, as part of the centenary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Metabolic Studio led 100 mules from L.A. to the source of the conduit’s water in the Eastern Sierra. With a nod to the animal workforce that built the aqueduct, the group traversed 240 miles of channels, pipes, and covered ditches over the course of a month.
One Hundred Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct is one of a series of photographs made during this journey with the Liminal Camera, a large-scale pinhole camera made from a shipping container that doubles as a darkroom. This massive panoramic photograph shows a portion of the aqueduct as it ascends the side of a mountain, and the mule pack in the valley below. The scale of the image, along with the insertion of the animal-human narrative (which is often left off stories of this engineering feat) and the ingenuity of the photographic equipment, echo the content of the image.
Eve Schillo
2021