Jamey Stillings: Infrastructure and Landscape

Jamey Stillings grew up in Oregon, received a BA in Art from Willamette University (1978), and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology (1982). Over three decades, he built a commercial photography business, and his clients included AIG, AT&T, Bausch & Lomb, Boeing, Discover Magazine, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Emirates Airlines, Epson, Ideogramma, Lannan Foundation, Lincoln Financial Group, The New York Times Magazine, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saturn, Time, Toshiba, Toyota, United Airlines, Xerox. By 2008 he was eager to shift more into fine art photography, and he found his first large-scale subject in the new bridge being constructed over the Colorado River near the existing Hoover Dam. A selection of his photographs documenting construction of the bridge received publication in The New York Times, and the series, The Bridge at Hoover Dam received several awards: 2010 CENTER Editor’s Choice Award, First Place; International Photography Awards, 2nd Place Architecture; American Photography 26; Best of ASMP 2010; PDN Photography Annual 2010; Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award Finalist 2010; and a 2012 Prix Pictet nomination. The book won the 2013 Gold Quill Award.

His next series, Changing Perspectives: The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar, received First Place in the 2013 International Photography Awards (IPA) in the Editorial Environmental Professional category. First published in June 2012 in The New York Times Magazine, the work has since been published around the world, including: Australian Public Broadcasting, B&W Magazine, Le Monde, Neue Energie, New Scientist, Newsweek Japan, NPR, The Picture Show, Orion Magazine, Time and Wired. Photographs from the project been exhibited in the United States, the Netherlands, and Colombia. The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar will become both an exhibition and a book. Both bodies of work are part of a larger planned project, Changing Perspectives, which will deal with large-scale energy projects.

The archive contains a series of exhibition proposals and related materials from both the Hoover Dam Bridge and Ivanpah Solar projects. Construction of the bridge downstream from Hoover Dam was unique for its historical importance, by its proximity to the dam, and for its technical achievement: bridging the Black Canyon over the Colorado River with the longest concrete arch span in North America. Stillings first photographed the bridge in March 2009, and continued to do so through its completion during the next two years. His intention was “to acknowledge the collective talents and labors of those who built the bridge, to place the bridge within the historical and aesthetic context of Hoover Dam and the American West, and to initiate a dialogue that the imposition of infrastructure within a natural environment inevitably summons.”

Before finishing the Bridge series, Stillings began work photographing the Ivanpah Solar project in the Mojave Desert not far from Las Vegas. He worked in both black and white and color, in the air and on the ground, the work being published in a book from Steidl in 2015. This started what he is now calling “CHANGING PERSPECTIVES: Energy in the American West,” an aerial and ground-based examination of energy development in the western United States. He notes: “While the project’s main focus is on renewable energy development, the impacts of contemporary fossil fuel energy production will also be an area of concentration.”

Stillings’ latest body of work, titled Changing Perspectives: India, seeks to integrate his aesthetic interests in the human-altered landscape with concern for issues of environmental sustainability.

Materials in the archive include work prints, catalogs, grant proposals, press materials, research materials, and exhibition ephemera.