Photographer Jean Albus is know for literally dressing up the landscapes she captures near her south central Montana home. She leaves dresses to weather in her harsh surroundings before photographing them, sometimes for as long as four years. Her final images sometimes feature a dress as she's found it, sunken into the elements. She also often superimposes the worn dress over another image of the landscape, floating the decaying dress within "Big Sky Country."
"It's one thing to take a picture of the landscape ... but to make it personal and to produce an emotional connection in the viewer, it was important to me to inject something into the photograph of me. And the dress became that," Albus describes her work in a new video explaining her process.
She also hopes to invoke emotion through the weathering process:
"It's amazing to watch how the elements affect them so that it brings to mind thoughts about aging, and thoughts about memory and transformation, transition, change," she says.
Now this is new! Using dresses to bring out the emotion in a photograph...but not in a fashion, stylist sort of context. This is more based around the fact that Jean Albus, uses the dresses to represent how the turmoil of weather can affect it's surroundings.