In the back room of the lower section of the gallery hang a series of five prints encased in square wooden frames. The barren trees stand prominently in each frame, looking angelic as their white silhouettes seem to glow against the warm manilla background. Their wiry arms reach up and out, branches expanding like veins to fill out the sky. Stepping closer to the prints, you can make out from the haze the shadows of three elephants, peaking through the trees like ghosts in a forest. The series manages to be at once hauntingly ethereal and warm and comforting with its soft colors and hazy grain. In this series, Fading Traces, Judy Bonderman tells a story, depicting the struggles of the African elephant and trees as they fight against an increasingly hostile climate.
Bonderman, a former public interest lawyer, started as a street photographer to document her travels across the world. Following COVID, however, Bonderman took a turn towards abstraction. Since enrolling in lessons with the Find Your Voice photography community, Bonderman has embraced experimentation and abstraction in her photography, using digital manipulation to layer images and enhance textures in a way that transforms her photographs entirely. Despite working solely with digital media, Bonderman’s works appear surreal and painting-like. Her photographs have a hand-drawn effect that seems completely at odds with the medium of digital photography. There is a spirituality to the way Bonderman describes her process. She improvises with her work, playing with collage and exposure in a way that feels "serendipitous" and “unpredictable” to create exaggerated fantasies of the realities she experiences. She describes the use of digital manipulation as “reflect[ing] [her] experience better than a single image could.”
Judy Bonderman, Trace 3, Archival fine art print
In her series Fading Traces, Bonderman “visualizes the impact of severe drought in Africa’s Savannah regions”. In the harsh savannah ecosystem, elephants and trees rely on each other to survive. The trees drop their fruit, nourishing the elephants who propagate their seeds as they defecate. In times of drought, elephants will ram their tusks into trees, tearing and chewing at their water-rich bark on their migration paths to watering holes. Normally, the trees are able to rejuvenate once the dry season ends. However as climate change has increased the number of heat waves and droughts in the African savannah, the elephant-eaten trees are unable to recover. As the trees become drier and drier, the elephants are forced to take more and more out of the trees. And as the trees start dying off completely, unable to retain water under dry conditions, the trees and elephants – reliant on each other – are under threat to disappear.
Using photographs taken during her trip to South Africa and Botswana in 2024, Bonderman manipulates and collages the images to depict the devastating impact of the ongoing drought. In choosing desaturated, pastel colors, Bonderman mimics the loss of life in the drying desert while the warmth of the yellows, pinks, greens, and blues imbues the photographs with a welcoming, serene atmosphere. The lightness of the lines and textures Bonderman overlays make the images look more like etching prints or hand-drawn sketches than digital photographs. The ghostly appearance of the trees and elephants are a reminder of the danger both are under to disappear. In printing the series in 7” x 7”, Bonderman encourages the viewer to look closely at the works. All together, this series of five photographs captures the warm, stagnant feel of the drying African savannah while the fading traces of the elephants and trees are a reminder of the threat they are under to disappear as the warming climate continues to eat at the resources they need to survive.
Written by Nina Wang