Article AAL 111 English Translation

This article was published in the Latin American art magazine:  Arte al Límite, Santiago de Chile, March - September 2026 issue. This is the English translation of the complete text from the original Spanish text by  Karla Siguelnitzky, Lic. en Historia del Arte (Chile).

BETSY GREEN
Landscapes as encounters, time and active memory

Karla Siguelnitzky, art historian.

In a world characterised by rapid images and an excess of visual content, Betsy Green’s artwork offers a fundamentally different approach to landscapes and the timing of photography. Her practice exists in a space of sustained attention, where the landscape is not simply a subject for quick snapshots but a complex presence that involves layers of experiences, history, and memory.

This approach becomes evident in American Sublime, a project she started before the pandemic, in which Green revisits some of the most emblematic landscapes of the Southwestern United States. Far from reaffirming the romanticised imagery of road trips or the epic of borders, her work introduces a well-grounded, critical eye, aware of the tensions plaguing territories: issues related to water, land ownership, and the rights of inhabitants. The monumental nature of landscapes coexists with hidden, untold subjects that are deeply rooted in place.

Using a 19th century plate camera and large-format analogue film, Green creates a sense of time that destabilises the dominant logic of contemporary images. Her chosen technique does not answer to nostalgia, but to a material and corporeal need to exist in the landscape and to inhabit the act of photography as lived experience. In her images, landscapes are not fixed or preserved—they remain open, available for new interpretations and displacement.

In this interview, she proposes a journey around the central axes of her artistic quest: landscapes as active memory, technology as an aesthetic stance, photography as embodied experiences, and formal containment as a critical response to current visual saturation and narratives. Betsy Green’s artwork goes beyond proclaiming meaning; it invites slow construction, persistence over time, and an observational approach that the landscape not as a mere image, but rather as a relationship.

Your work unfolds within landscapes that seem to resist being read as mere images. From your artistic research, how do you understand landscape today?

I understand landscape today as all three together: as a cultural representation, a physical experience, and as a form of active memory that emerges through encounter. The landscapes I choose to photograph are never random. I deliberately select locations that carry multiple known references and that are researched beforehand. At the same time, it is the act of seeing and making that binds the studied to the intuitive. I always begin from a personal, emotional sense of connection to the landscape as something active and present.

Your deliberate use of an anachronistic technology introduces a temporality that stands apart from the dominant logic of contemporary image-making. Beyond a technical choice, could the use of a plate camera be understood as a position taken against visual acceleration and the mass production of images?

It is an anachronistic technology, but one that I combine with modern analogue sheet film. The properties of film —its tangible, physical existence— are essential to my process. Physically working with real film and a large-format camera is visceral; I become one with the camera. Yes, it is a statement, but not an activist one. It is more about presence and embodiment than opposition.

In many of your photographs, the landscape does not appear to be fixed or preserved, but rather held in a state of latency. How do you conceive photography as a space in which memory is not archived, but activated in unstable ways, open to displacement and renewed readings?

For me, memory is not archived, it is lived. Even when I intentionally seek certain conditions, the process depends on being fully present in the moment: observing, waiting, and selecting slowly. Photography becomes activated in unforeseen ways, open to dissociation, imagination, and renewed readings. It remains unstable, otherworldly, and open-ended.

At a moment when landscape photography is increasingly shaped by ecological, extractive, and post-human discourses, your work avoids explicit gestures and operates through a precise formal restraint. Do you see silence, distance, and incompleteness as critical strategies in response to visual and narrative saturation today?

Silence, distance, and incompleteness are all referential to the human condition, without relying on an explicit narrative. They allow for a more universal, inferred reading. My stance is opposed to the visual and narrative saturation of today. I believe meaning is built, not declared. It requires time, persistence, learning how to see what is already there, and patience. This is not about documenting, but about interpreting the landscape into a transformative experience. AAL