I press my face against the cold plastic window of the Boeing 787, peering through the clouds and San Francisco fog, trying to get in position to see the bizarre unearthly landscape unfolding at 3000 feet beneath me as we descended to San Francisco International Airport. This airborne ritual is now an integral part of my return to the city I have now called home over the last two decades.
The San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds are bizarrely beautiful. This past year I was inspired to create this body of work, capturing their unearthly visual appearance and complex history. I wanted to document the razor-sharp lines and neon-hued colors of the Bay’s remaining Salt Ponds as they change throughout the seasons—and by exposure to heat from the sun—revealing far more than just an algae-tinted saline swirl of vivid colors framed by man-made mud dikes.
My Buddhist upbringing taught me not to dwell on the past; that is not something we can change or have control over. Yet when I dug deeper behind the visually stunning and captivating colors and shapes of the salt ponds, I inevitably learned of their dark past—a past scarred by both ecological and cultural disasters.
