John Pfahl is a photographer who works completely within the straightforward, documentary tradition of photography, yet his work also defies that tradition. He uses our expectations of photographic truth to demonstrate how "facts" can be manufactured. In the Altered Landscapes portfolio, each image is the result of painstaking technical work on the site to construct ingenious and witty illusions of perspective. In a more recent body of work, Power Places, Pfahl photographed the sites of nuclear power plants in the grand style of nineteenth-century photographers who captured the beauty and monumentality of nature. He thus creates an ironic commentary on the place of such plants in the modern landscape.
For Triangle, Bermuda Pfahl stationed his camera in an intertidal zone where he constructed the base of a triangle: its other two legs run into the sea-wash. Pfahl photographed what appeared before his camera, but the objects he recorded are not actually where they appear to be. The monocular camera has compressed space to give the illusion that the rock in the background and the pegs in the foreground really lie in the same plane. The image reads as a string drawing yet also conveys scale and distance, creating a disconcerting shift between simultaneous yet contradictory perceptions of real space.
