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Hinterland Ontologies: Photographs of the Rural Landscape
Thesis

Hinterland Ontologies: Photographs of the Rural Landscape

keegan charles baatz
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Washington State University
2026
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Abstract

My thesis exhibition is comprised of materially altered landscape photographs that use processes such as erasure, separation, and embroidery to disrupt the image’s apparent unity and reveal it as a contingent, constructed system. Through these processes, I reconfigure the photograph as a system dependent on alignment, material tension, and viewer interaction. This project examines landscape as a network of ecological, infrastructural, and perceptual relationships rather than a stable or passive scene. Within this framework, I focus specifically on the hinterland as a site where these systems become visible, revealing how rural environments operate as connective spaces within broader networks of energy and infrastructure. Even when the human figure appears, it operates as another structural element within broader systems of dependency. In their entirety, these works position the photograph as a diagram rather than a window: a site where coherence is negotiated rather than assumed.The work in this series challenges both the materiality and the assumed finality of the documentary image through these processes. In the erasure work, I remove material from the photographic surface to preserve structural form while stripping away surface fidelity. In layered and color-separated installations, images fracture into spatial planes that resolve only when the viewer stands at a particular point in front of the work. In select works, embroidery introduces visible acts of maintenance, sustaining instability rather than restoring wholeness.

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