Photographer Rachel Heath’s somber but inviting series of images entitled Buildings, Birds & Brackish Water: Lake Merritt On Foot, are at once unsentimental and nostalgic. They show a deeply altered landscape that is nonetheless full of unexpected beauty and surprising juxtapositions—a place where the need to discern between natural and artificial, past and present, public and private, or sacred and mundane is not so pressing—a place that feels (and arguably is) more open than elsewhere in the city. The black and white, relatively unpopulated, and sometimes shadowy scenes temper this feeling of openness with a sense of loss and longing—as though the landscape these images document has already disappeared.
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