Johnnie Chatman

What the Water Told Me and the Birds Whispered, 2022–26

Johnnie Chatman is an artist who has created black-and-white self-portraits against the backdrop of various iconic American landscapes. Through these images, he raises questions about the intersection of tourism, capital, labor, and spectacle with visual culture. His interest in the social reality of landscapes stems from the ways in which places have been historically learned and experienced through their potential and contradictions. For Chatman, landscape photography is a tool for recounting master narratives and addressing public memory.

Following an INSITE expedition to San Quintin in Baja California in 2021, Chatman began to explore the language of vernacular photography to unveil the multiple layers of contested natural sites across the region. These include experimental nuclear sites, the Salton Sea, the Tijuana River Estuary, and El Chinero, among others. While these places have the appearance of being wildlife sanctuaries or tourist bioreserves, they in fact have a buried history of power, economic exploitation, and social control.

For his INSITE Commission What the Water Told Me and the Birds Whispered, 2021–25, Chatman conceived a visual essay depicting various habitats across Baja California and Southern California. In his research process, water and birds emerged as signals of how ecosystems are erratic and resilient, despite being affected by historical conflict. Through his installation, the artist suggests his interest in the overlap between iconography from the American West, tourism, and popular culture with the untold backstory of agriculture, mining, migration, and militarization.