Jake Longstreth: Tulare

From 2008 to 2012, often in the dead of summer, American painter Jake Longstreth (born 1977) photographed the dusty, utilitarian Central Valley of California, a severe inland topography formerly occupied by the massive Tulare Lake. With a tonal restraint echoing the style of his own flatly realistic paintings, Longstreths photographs capture the hazy, blinding sunlight and muted palette of this region, a topography that has been transformed from a lush, wild terraincelebrated by John Muir in 1868 as one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloominto the monotonously fertile industrial farmland it is today. Millions of people pass over the dry lake-bed in their cars every year, unaware of its previous existence, Longstreth notes with ambivalent fascination. A Taco Bell now stands roughly where the shores of Tulare Lake once were.