Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller: Tracy Hills

Tracy Hills by Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller © 2025 Radius Books, paperwork the development of a master-planned group in California’s Central Valley close to San Francisco from 2021-2024. Both photographers method the topic by shared considerations about ecological menace: the lack of farmland and habitat, drought, wildfire, elevated warmth, and unchecked improvement. The images replicate trauma created upon the land by environmental instability and growth.

I requested Yogan why they selected the Tracy Hills improvement to {photograph} when there have been many developments popping up in all places throughout California. Yogan replied, “Tracy Hills happened to be on Ryan’s route after a trip to San Francisco in July 2021. We had met a month prior. When he was back in L.A., I visited him and brought prints of my then developing Telotypes series as well as landscape work I made in Iceland between 2014 and 2017. Then he sowed me maps of Tracy Hills and suggested we go there together to explore. We didn’t have a project in mind. We simply wanted to have fun photographing. Unbeknownst to us, we returned over and over to Tracy Hills. It was a huge playground and a place where we felt we could further the conversation that the New Topographics laid forth 50 years ago.”

Because each artists are photographing inside an in depth proximity, the photographs share a visible language of constructing supplies and gear, energy strains, phrases, phrases and numerical markings on surfaces, scorched vegetation, plowed earth, and traces of fireside and regrowth. Yet they discovered their very own methods to interpret the panorama.

Housed as two separate books inside a single slipcase, the publication exhibits the artists’ contrasting photographic processes. Muller works in shade utilizing a digital digicam, whereas McIntosh makes use of an 8×10-inch view digicam to provide handmade silver chloride contact prints within the conventional moist darkroom. The publication additionally contains contributing essays by Britt Salvesen and Greg Foster-Rice.

Just a few months after the challenge was thought full, a wildfire swept by the realm surrounding Tracy Hills. Both artists returned to {photograph} the aftermath. The remaining sequence brings collectively photographs made earlier than and after the fireplace, revealing wildfire not as an remoted occasion, however as a consequence of constructing inside an more and more susceptible atmosphere.