Louise Russell

I acknowledge that the land where I photograph and produce these images is the unceded, traditional territory of the Kumeyaay Band of Nations, past and present.

The river's stories drive my image making for this series Reverence: The San Diego River, and the beauty of the river guides the framing. The beauty includes elements that can suggest the troubles of the place as well as the wonders of the place. For the San Diego River, these troubles started with taking the land from the Kumeyaay Native Americans in 1769. Today, some of the troubles are the unsheltered people living alongside the riverbed and the tons of trash, some stuck in the mud, and others flowing to the sea. Even so, we can embody the wonders here and feel a presence that is timeless.

Arthur Ollman said of the river photographs, "… Russell, by using tripod, pinhole and scanner, and Photoshop, has created a hybrid of processes and thus appearances. Then, by employing the old romantic, classic viewpoint and pristine place selections, she also gives us a fall from grace interruption of unlovely human intrusions. Identifying mundane places in ways that identify issues is a way to show a subtler and in-the-end more meaningful statement."

These photographs are captured with an 8" x 10" pinhole camera. The film is processed in my darkroom, scanned, edited in Photoshop, printed on Pictorico film, then white gold leaf is hand-applied. The white gold leaf shimmers and expresses my reverence for the river, its precious and fragile nature, and our effects on it, past and present.