The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar

“Spectacular photographs have preserved this march to modernity and beyond. Ivanpah Solar is a historic marker of our era, bringing major technologies and cultural changes, and preserved in Stillings’ timely, graphic, and memorable photographs.”  –Anne Wilkes Tucker, MFAH Curator of Photography, ret.

“Mr. Stillings’ images have a sublime quality, too. A hundred years from now, when technology moves on and the magic fades, they may be a testament to a complicated harmony.” –NY Times Lensblog

Jamey Stillings synthesizes his environmental interests with a fascination for the intersections of nature and human activity. In 2010, before construction commenced, Stillings began a four-year aerial exploration over what has become the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant, Ivanpah Solar in the Mojave Desert of California.
Shooting fluidly and concisely from a helicopter during first and last light, Stillings’ striking black and white images intrigue with tight abstractions, oblique views of geologic and geometric forms, and broad open views of the dramatic desert basin within which the solar plant and other marks-of-man reside.
Renewable energy projects, like Ivanpah, also raise challenging questions about land and resource use. Though Ivanpah Solar was built in the American Southwest, the promise and challenge of renewable energy raise issues that are global in nature. Stillings’ photographs strive to participate in our contemporary discussion about the environment and climate change, while providing imagery that will quickly impart historical perspective.

“I endeavor to create imagery relevant both to our present-day collective conversation, and to a future historical perspective of this era on Earth.” –Jamey Stillings

"This confrontation of man-made objects and nature in his images is the art, the documentation, the story and the dialogue... Planned. Intended. Visually challenging.” –FotoRelevance

The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar exhibition is being released in conjunction with a book of the same title published by Steidl, fall 2015.