Photograph by Peter Essick
During the pandemic Peter Essick, an award-winning photographer who often shoots for National Geographic, was spending a lot of time on the road. Commuting regularly from his home in Stone Mountain for a project at the Fernbank Museum in North Druid Hills, Essick began to notice all the construction projects popping up along the route. “From the road, all that construction wasn’t that visually interesting,” Essick says. “But then I started thinking, what would it look like from a drone?” With that idea, a new project was born.
Photograph by Peter Essick
Photograph by Peter Essick
Work in Progress, out now from Fall Line Press, is Essick’s latest book, a meditation on his familiar themes of nature, the environment, and changing landscapes. The images are all aerial, shot from above using a drone camera to depict the strange beauty of construction sites in and around Atlanta. Rendered through Essick’s artist eye, the upended dirt, bare concrete, and vacant machinery are dislocated from their practical applications, transformed instead into abstract compositional elements. The images themselves evoke more painting than photo, something Essick says was intentional. “It’s pretty hard to make a truly abstract picture just going out to the field with a camera,” he explains. But by shooting from far above, he found reality could blend into something almost impressionistic: “As you get closer, you can see the shovels and tire tracks, this combination of reality and unreality.”
Photograph by Peter Essick
Photograph by Peter Essick
Essick, who was named one of the 40 most influential outdoor photographers by Outdoor Photography magazine, is well-known for his work documenting the impact of human development on the natural world. Such images often focus on extreme environmental degradation in other parts of the world, whether it’s polluted rivers in Russia or giant smokestacks in China. Work in Progress, all shot within an hour of Essick’s home, offered an opportunity to consider the impact of more local, everyday environmental change. “One big warehouse development might clear-cut 40 acres or something, that’s not that bad,” says Essick. “But you add them up, there’s a sort of death by a thousand cuts. I had read about Atlanta’s loss of tree canopy and started seeing this construction as sort of an environmental issue.”
Photograph by Peter Essick
Photograph by Peter Essick
Photograph by Peter Essick
But at the same time construction impacts the environmental, it’s also part and parcel of Atlanta’s growth and development—a duality that’s not lost of Essick, and part of the inspiration for his book’s title. “Progress can mean different things to different people,” he says. “There’s kind of a double meaning there, trying to look at what progress really means.” While most of the images are of commercial developments, the last photo is of a residential, single-family home construction: a nod towards the enduring mythology of the American Dream and its promise of ample private space. “That last picture is a code, the idea that all of this progress comes to down to all of us wanting our own house, our own place,” Essick says.
Photograph by Peter Essick
Photograph by Peter Essick
As a collection of images of unfinished space, Work in Progress also denotes the dynamic change all around us in an ever-growing Atlanta. As the city grows, these abstract images remind us, so too the land will change and change again. “Artists think about their projects as ‘works in progress,’” Essick says. “And that’s what these are in essence: the landscape, itself, is a work in progress.”
A version of this article appears in our October 2024 issue.
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