The Reflecting Pool, 2025, HD Video, 4:22 min
During the process of gathering archival images for the Cascadia Project, I collected the work of Timothy O’Sullivan, even though his imagery is not strictly of the Cascadia region. However, O’Sullivan’s work links the American photographic epoch’s eastern and western projects during the 1860’s. After photographing the Civil War for Brady and Co., O’Sullivan traveled West with Clarence King’s surveying expedition in advance of the transcontinental railroad. While O’Sullivan was photographing the vast western desert and the canyon’s of the Colorado, Carleton Watkins of San Francisco, internationally known for his 1862 photographs of Yosemite, was photographing the Columbia River gorge running between the Oregon and Washington territories, a major Cascadian waterway.
In The Reflecting Pool, I employ Photoshop’s 2025 AI enhanced erasure tool to remove the water from O’Sullivan’s 1868 image, Hot Spring, Ruby Valley, Nevada. In subsequent still images I use the digital tool to expose the muddy bottom of the Colorado River. Water and its availability has built and destroyed western American civilizations for thousands of years. It is America’s most valuable, life sustaining resource, a resource threatened by the rapid industrialization European colonization and settlement brought. There is an essential irony in the use of AI in visually and metaphorically erasing water from O’Sullivan’s 19th century western landscapes because AI and the enormous natural resources it consumes in its operations is literally threatening those very resources.
The Reflecting Pool Gone Dry, 2025, Archival print 32 x 40
Looking Across the Muddy Bottom, 2025, Archival print 32 x 40
Bill Jones | studio 