Artists Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison connect their work with the environment and remind people to stop destroying the natural environment. In their artist’s statement, they said “Our photographs offer visual poems of loss, human struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and over-use”.

I have chosen the “Precipice” series as an artwork for study and analysis. In this photo, a man is standing on the edge of a cliff in a suit with an ax in his hand. There was a dead tree in front of him. Its roots extend below the cliff. The man looks at the tree and is hesitant to cut down the tree in front of him. The tone of the whole picture is very dark, but this tree is a bright color. But this color is very inconspicuous in the whole environment. If the man cut down this tree, the cliff would collapse and he would die. This work implies a truth that destroying the environment is also killing humans themselves.

 

The entire tone of this piece is gray, only the stage and some grunge are colored. A man stands on a broken stage, which is littered with rubbish and dumped broken chairs. The man was wearing a suit and looked very decent, but his pants were dirty. In this work, things and environments created by humans are equally shabby. Such an environment surrounds people and makes people feel very uncomfortable.

 

In this work, a man holds a painting and hangs it behind. The landscape in the painting is a forest and a river, but the environment here is actually an amusement park. He seems to be setting up the scene for the shoot, which includes chairs, rugs, tables and potted plants. Human construction dismissals and false images of nature become contrasts. Humans invaded nature, deforested and built cities. This amusement park may have been a forest before.