FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
DILLON MARSH
"Active or dormant, the mines speak of a combination of sacrifice and profit. Their nature is raw, unsightly scars on the landscape: feats of forced labour and skilled engineering, built to extract value from the land but also exacting a price. These images combine photography and computer-generated elements in an effort to visualise the product of various mines in South Africa. The CGI objects represent scale models of the materials extracted from the ground. In doing so, the intention is to create a kind of visualisation of the merits and shortcomings of this industry that has radically shaped the country's history and economy."
Dillon Marsh
Hydra exhibition in collaboration with LIFE FRAMER.
The porosity of a foreign object...
Dillon Marsh's series "For What It's Worth" not only questions mining practices in the Republic of South Africa, his native country. Interpreting economic data, the artifice of disrupting the landscape and questioning the ecological deterioration derived from capital flows could be encompassed in an approach to the image from an ethical and aesthetic valuation.
How to assess or justify the economic value in the extraction of highly specialised minerals, which irreversibly impact the landscape? Benefits, costs and deterioration in the balance. Aesthetic incursion that explores the porosity between the photographic medium and the use of CGI (Computer Graphic Images).
A strange, sensually polished object that is perceived as a very real object in a disrupted natural space. Sphere extracted from solid material quoted on the stock exchange, which sits peacefully in the destruction of the environment.
The use of both media in a single medium allows Marsh to create a very relevant visuality in these times of fake news, perfect digital photo retouching, volatile markets, global warming and increasing environmental awareness.
DILLON MARSH
South Africa.
He is the winner of the Series Award 2018 contest of the international platform Life Framer, where Hydra participated as a jury in this issue as part of our collaborative program with international spaces dedicated to photography.