TINY GEMS

“When I shoot, I subtract things,” New York-based photographer Philip Toledano writes. “What if I went to an environment that was missing everything. Instead of subtracting, I would have to add. So I went to the Arctic Circle.” Mr. Toledano’s images of the Arctic Circle contrast nicely with his photographs of recently-abandoned, bankrupt American offices. He dwarfs human and arboreal figures in the landscape of the Arctic, while pencils, books, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera loom large in his images of the modern built environment. No matter what we’d like to think — Mr. Toledano seems to say — we are an afterthought in the greater scope of our world. Or, as one of my high-school English teachers might have put it, the “Man vs. Nature” battle is refreshingly stacked against us.

Via Urban Planning Blog.