Dan Hendrickson

The “Future Artifact” series imagines visuals from a world that has undergone significant climate change by the year 2041. The use of the 19th century photographic medium of cyanotype in this series hints that a radical shift has occurred in society because a typical medium like digital photography is not employed to capture the images. Cyanotype is instead a medium that uses basic, non-electronic techniques for its development. All that is needed are chemical, water, and a steady, uninterrupted sun. It is a method for a time that has gone "back to basics."

Beyond just the technique though, there’s melancholy in the images themselves. Why are massive 747s abandoned, and aircraft fuselages reduced to a state of Roman ruin? Some of these aircraft look recently landed and deserted, while others seem to have been scavenged over time. The aircraft also look like they have been left in a desert, but why are there no cactuses or other large flora in these scenes? Has the weather shifted so rapidly that nothing has taken root yet? Perhaps it’s just not habitable land.

The idea of future disasters induced by climate change lives mostly in statistical projections, and not in our conscious minds. This series visualizes potential scenes from the future that are not representative of first order effects like rising seas or melting ice. Instead, the series captures anxious and nebulous secondary or tertiary effects of climate change.