Marcus DeSieno's sweeping, moody landscapes bring to mind the panoramic vistas of photographer Ansel Adams or the endless horizons of painter Albert Bierstadt. They look like the sort of thing that required hiking many miles into the wilderness with a camera or easel. But DeSieno works from a desk, with a computer mouse in one hand and a beer in the other.
DeSieno spends hours searching more than 10,000 traffic and weather cameras overlooking rugged mountains, pastoral fields, and lonely roads. He rarely knows why cameras stand watch over these remote locations, but finds the images fascinating. “I’ve watched the sun set over the Grand Canyon, seen waves crashing into Hawaii, watched storms passing over [the Swiss Alps],” DeSieno says of the images in Surveillance Landscapes. “It’s all from the comfort of my desk chair.”
Credit Edward Snowden for DeSieno's fixation with webcams. He did a lot of work with parasites and bacteria before Snowden's leaks in 2013 got him thinking about privacy and surveillance. A little research introduced him to the vast network of open source webcams, CCTV and surveillance cameras. “I love the idea of capturing this wilderness through this visual technology that’s meant to subdue,” he says.
He is among a growing number of photographers working with open access webcams. Kurt Caviezel hacks them to observe humanity's sheep-like behavior, and Andrew Hammerand spent years spying on a small town in the Midwest. Their photos intrigue you because they seem voyeuristic, almost illicit. And they remind you that privacy is tenuous.
DeSieno makes screenshots of particularly enchanting vistas, and his collection includes several thousand images. He edits them each week, selecting the most compelling and photographing them with a large format camera and waxed-paper negatives. This softens the pixelation of the screenshots, giving his final images the dreamy look of the landscape photographs of the 19th century.
The images celebrate the beauty of nature even as they highlight the ubiquity of surveillance in the last place you'd expect it. “You can go out into Yosemite and think that you are having a private moment with this beautiful natural landscape, but I’m on the other side of my computer watching you take a picture of this vista,” DeSieno says. Big Brother truly is everywhere.
