3rd place
bronze star award
> joSon
united states
title
Healing Landscape: A Damaged World in Transition
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entry description
This past year I was inspired to create a body of work capturing the unearthly visual landscape of the vast San Francisco Bay Area Salt Ponds. Once home to a stunning array of wildlife and plants, viewed from above these wetlands are now a world of searing colors and swirling patterns. Yet their complex industrial history, including the use of their salt to manufacture napalm in the 1960s —the searing effects of which I witnessed firsthand during my upbringing as a young Buddhist monk in Vietnam—has increasingly led me to see them in a new light. Ultimately what inspired me to spend an entire year dangling from a helicopter in frigid weather to make these images was the story of this thriving land in transition: a healing landscape that unites many worlds as one. Gallery print: 43" by 64” (110cm by 162.5 cm) ed. of 7about the photographer
Award-winning photographer joSon was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and an African American father. Sent to live with his mother’s family in Vietnam at age ten, he was educated in a Buddhist temple in preparation for becoming a monk. “I thought that was my calling long before I saw life through the viewfinder,” joSon recollects. “But the truth is, I have never left the monk-hood. I just left the temple.” Today joSon is a professional photographer based in San Francisco whose work is collected by an international list of clients. His work has appeared in magazines including Scientific American, Outside, Conde Nast Traveler and Vogue. He as won awards from Photo District News (PDN), Communication Arts, and American Illustration and American Photography (AI-AP). As Sunset Magazine described joSon’s first monograph, joSon: Intimate Portraits of Nature, from Graphis Press in 2013: "Had Richard Avedon taken up gardening, he might have ended up with photos like this.”back to gallery