Overshoot #12 – A Yr In Evaluate

©Yogan Muller, Mirror (Telotype #3), Muirfield Road, Los Angeles, October 2019. From the collection Telotypes (2019-2023).

Marking one yr of Overshoot. The column launched on Lenscratch on March 30, 2025, with a easy premise: we live in a time of ecological overshoot, and photographers are uniquely positioned to supply which means on this ever-changing second.

In the context of accelerating local weather change, artists, curators, and writers have launched deep inquiries into our environmental peril. A renewed consciousness of what we’ve carried out to the pure world has solidified, and pictures has develop into an agent of change in each sense of the phrase. 

In Overshoot #6, Siobhan Angus shared a number of the most salient conclusions one can learn in Camera Geologica. An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024). Angus’ e-book brings the minerals which have made pictures the medium and observe it’s to the fore. Whether it’s silver (analog pictures) or uncommon earth metals (digital pictures), Angus refreshingly reminds us {that a} international, extractivist infrastructure is mobilized each time we go “click.” 

In her ongoing collection, Supernatural, Liz Miller Kovacs (Overshoot #9) creates photographic tableaux the place a draped feminine determine poses in entrance of large-scale mining operations. Open pits and tailing ponds are recurring motifs. Her draped determine appears notably susceptible within the presence of business toxicity and the stupendous scales of pits, pushing the viewer to actively take into account the planetary ramifications of extractivism. Miller Kovacs certainly traveled to all 5 continents to develop the collection.

Photography and native ecologies have lengthy been intertwined, for instance, via the research and exploitation of timber. In Overshoot #5, Alex Turner discusses his multi-year survey of California forests utilizing a thermal digital camera to seize the warmth signature of timber, actually taking the visible pulse of typically age-old, iconic California timber akin to Sequoias. The thermal digital camera reveals carved inscriptions beneath the tree bark courting again to the 1860s, which brings us again to survey pictures within the American West. After I loved the collection at Marshall Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA, final summer time, I couldn’t assist however see pictures enmeshed throughout the American West panorama, sources, and colonization.

In city areas, pictures’s instantaneity is a robust software to chop via the loud hustle and bustle of cities. Their setting, communities, and enlargement have been the predilections of many artists. Walking and photographing the city panorama, they interrogate architectural gestures, touch upon environmental injustice, and deconstruct the manicured nature that dot our cities. In their work, Ryan McIntosh (Overshoot #2), Misha de Ridder (Overshoot #4), Ayda Gragossian (Overshoot #7), Arturo Soto (Overshoot #8), Alexandre Dupeyron (Overshoot #10), and Kaya&Blank (Overshoot #11) have all made the town an agent that regularly shifts, molds, and imprints the panorama and other people’s lives. With the added complexity of local weather change and the elevated stress it places on sources akin to water, cities will stay a crucial locus for ecologically-minded photographic investigations.

In the previous 10-15 years, magical realism has develop into some of the productive modes of photographic inquiry and storytelling. Marine Lanier, who was featured within the inaugural column (Overshoot #1), embraces magic realism to chart the emergence of synergetic situations, cosmologies, and relationships with the pure world. Her collection and e-book, Le Jardin d’Hannibal (Poursuite, 2024), conveys each awe and concern for the Arctic flora scientists transplanted at excessive elevations within the Alps to measure the results of temperature elevations on plant progress and well being. In Lanier’s work, the human, microscopic, and geologic scales collide. As a outcome, the viewer finds themselves coexisting with an enormous array of earthlings, supplies, and areas. And whereas grief is palpable in her portraits, it’s a power that grounds and mobilizes fairly than petrifying us.

Through their private work, programs, and the Canary Project, artist duo Sayler/Morris (Overshoot #3) have been educating youthful generations for properly over 25 years, deepening their understanding of and engagement with ecological points. As an educator, I consider this act of transmission is essential. For me, it begins with a humble reminder to college students: people coexist with hundreds of thousands of plant, animal, and bug species. See a tree? Look up and marvel on the vibrant avian life that animates it. That realization typically produces an epiphany that may change lives. And if college students later handle to seize such epiphanies of their footage, they’ve the superpower to specific radical dedication and maybe mobilize a wider public.

In this new season of Overshoot, I’ll proceed to succeed in out to artists, curators, writers, and activists, and ask them to inform us about our beloved medium in relation to the ecological disaster. For it’s as a lot a know-how that ushered us into the geological image of the Anthropocene as it’s a salient software for reckoning with this very entry.

I thank all of the artists from the primary season of Overshoot:

#1: Marine Lanier (

#2: Ryan McIntosh (

#3: Sayler/Morris (

#4: misha de ridder (

#5: Alex Turner (

#6: Siobhan Angus (

#7: Ayda Gragossian (

#8: Arturo Soto (

#9: Liz Miller Kovacs (

#10: Alexandre Dupeyron (

#11: Kaya&Blank (

#12: Yogan Muller (A yr in evaluation)

Biosketch: Yogan Muller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impression on landscapes, sources, and communities. Research, crucial approaches to panorama, fieldwork, and design are central to his course of. He works with pictures, photogrammetry, drones, and the e-book kind.

After the traumatic lack of his father in February 2022, belonging, id, and fractured roots are themes that got here to the fore. He sublimates his loss in JPM, an ongoing, manifold undertaking which culminated in a e-book dummy he conceived, designed, and produced inside Penumbra Foundation’s Long-Term Program (Photobooks) in 2024 and 2025. His JPM dummy has been shortlisted and exhibited on the LUMA Foundation through the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, the 2026 Dummy Award (Photobook Museum, Cologne, Germany), and the 2026 Athens Photo Festival in Greece.

In October 2019, Yogan moved to Los Angeles to affix the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught pictures, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at UCLA DMA between 2020 and 2024.

In November 2018, he graduated with one among the primary practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

His work is within the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and personal collections.

Website: www.yogan-muller.com

Instagram: @yoganmuller