I came across Celina Clanet’s work in Jesse Alexander’s book Perspectives on Place. This project looks at dams in the French Alps, and men connected with them. This intimate connection between place and self drew my attention, as has Clanet’s beautiful images, with their clear, warm palette and careful composition that rarely strays far from the picturesque and the sublime. That’s certainly the case here – the deft use of mist and the receding diagonals of the dam are answered in the line of moss in the lower right hand side, while the figure’s gaze up draws out gaze up too – to take in the vastness of concrete out of frame but presumably above.

It’s this inclusion of people within the landscape, and the way they’re included, that disrupts her work from being simply attractive. The men are generally, as here, diminutive, and neither large enough to be portraits, nor active enough to be documentary. To an extent, they become symbols of the smallness of the men in comparison to the things they make or manage, and thus the extraordinary power of human ingenuity. This mixture of vulnerability and omnipotence is unsettling, as if mankind has alienated himself in the world he makes. It’s both celebration and criticism of the foundations of the anthropocene.