LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Aaron Rothman: The Sierra by Linda AlterwitzDecember 18, 2025

“The Sierra” by Aaron Rothman, The Eriskay Connection, 2025

In The Sierra (Eriskay Collection, 2025), Aaron Rothman transforms his decades-long relationship with the Sierras into a meditation on beauty, loss, and environmental change. The book explores the American wilderness not only as a place of awe and refuge but also as a landscape increasingly shaped by ecological distress.

Rothman visited the Sierra Nevada since childhood and returned each year with his family. Yet, as an adult, the landscape he knew is shifting. The wilderness now coexists with a rising unease as the marks of climate change become evident.

Over the past six years, Rothman has photographed the Sierras with a 4×5 film camera, often returning to the same places to observe what has changed. In the studio, he transforms many of these images through digital interventions, inverting colors so that bright skies take on the smoky hues of wildfire season, or washing out scenes until only faint traces remain. These altered images invite viewers to consider not only what the Sierra is but also what it is becoming—a landscape shaped by uncertainty, and possibly unrecognizability.

Front Cover (detail) “The Sierra” by Aaron Rothman, The Eriskay Connection, 2025

The Sierra Nevada Mountains spurred my love of the natural world and my involvement in photography. Growing up in a topographically lacking Midwestern suburb, my family’s annual trips to the Sierra instilled in me a sense of wonder and possibility. As a teenager, wanting to manifest these feelings in images, I taught myself photography using Ansel Adams’ books. My early artistic impulses fit right in with longstanding representations of the Sierra. From Albert Bierstadt and Carleton Watkins’ 19th century views through Adams’ oeuvre to modern Sierra Club calendars, the soaring granite peaks and clear, cold rivers and lakes are pictured as an archetypal kind of American wilderness, separated from human affairs. Of course, the Sierra was an exploited natural resource since European settlers arrived, and climate change makes clear that these places are not above human activities, but are subject to them.

I still go to the Sierra every year, and I still find myself awed and consoled there. However, a growing anxiety and anticipatory sense of loss now attends each trip. The physical signs of climate change become a bit more evident every year, and forest fires are a constant presence – be it smoke haze filling the sky or newly burned areas on my regularly traveled routes. Over the past few years, I have been building a body of work that seeks to express my conflicted feelings of awe and distress, and to reexamine the idea of wilderness that the Sierra has signified. My images are rooted in a direct connection to place in the moment of photographing, and are made using a large-format film camera. After returning to the studio, I spend a long time working digitally with the images. Some images are left “straight”. In some, I invert the colors – blue atmospheric haze becomes smoky yellow, cyan skies tinge sepia, green trees turn alien purples. In others, I wash out the image to the edge of visibility, leaving a trace that can seem more idea than physical place.

I photographed using a 4×5 film camera. I print these on a Japanese bamboo paper or, for the very washed out images, on a thin kozo paper. Sizes range between approximately 20” x 24” and 40” x 50”.

art; science; nature; technology; medical imaging

Aaron Rothman is a photographic artist who has focused for the past two decades on the American West. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, he has exhibited with the Cleveland Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Cheekwood Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Art, University of Virginia, and Rick Wester Fine Art and Gitterman Gallery in New York.

A book of his recent work, The Sierra, was published in 2025 by The Eriskay Connection, (Breda, Netherlands), and an earlier monograph. Signal Noise, was published by Radius Books, (Santa Fe, New Mexico). He has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Speranza Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, and The Print Center in Philadelphia. Aaron’s work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Photographic Arts.

In addition to his studio work, Aaron has written essays and curated art and photography features on landscape, architecture and urbanism for Places Journal. Aaron’s writings have also been published in Photo-Eye Magazine and The Caravan.

Aaron has an MFA from Arizona State University and a BA from Grinnell College. He lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.

Instagram: @rothman_aaron

The Eriskay Connection is a Dutch studio for book design and an independent publisher. We focus on contemporary storytelling at the intersection of photography, research and writing. In close collaboration with authors we make books as autonomous bodies of work that provide us with new and necessary insights into the world around us. The key for us is to convey the essence of their work through high-quality editing, design, and production. Our editions are mainly offset printed and bound in the Netherlands and we strive to work with local producers and sustainable materials as much as possible.

Instagram: @eriskayconnection

Linda Alterwitz is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. Her work homes in on visualizing unseen systems that shape our world, encouraging dialogue around choice, trust, and collective experience. She has been an editor for Lenscratch Magazine since 2015 and is currently the Art + Science editor.

Website
Instagram

Tags: Aaron Rothman, Environment, Historical Processes, Large Format, Photography Book, Photography Books, The West