Photographer Marcus Lyon’s images of crammed megacities and never-ending highways might make you feel like going off the grid.
In his claustrophobic series BRICs, Exodus, and Timeout, Lyon creates large-scale visions of globalization and human activity. The images aren't just photos of Moscow or Mumbai or Marina del Rey, but composites of hundreds of images meant to overwhelm you with the enormity of it all.
Lyon’s photographs are minutely planned to the last detail, sometimes years before they are made. After conceptualizing the image in his head---which requires tremendous research and strategizing---he flies over a specific location just once, photographing the ground below. Lyon then digitally stitches together as many as 1,000 photographs to achieve an image that drowns the viewer in congested chaos. The intricate compositions are an artful commentary on humanity’s never-ending expansion and consumption, and the vast chasm between the rich and poor.
"Emotionally and environmentally these mass ideas, actions, movements of people, production processes, and the titans of political and consumer power that house them, are so huge that no single image can define their influence," Lyon says of the work. "So I have endeavored to create new visual languages within which I can communicate a deeper truth."
From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, each photo teems with urbanization. In Lyon's dystopian vision of the world, there is nary a tree to be seen, and the world is overrun with planes, trains and automobiles swarming across the globe. Lyon weaves his images together so seamlessly that the megacities and mass transit systems he fashions almost could be mistaken for the real thing.
Though the work is fiction, the images are familiar, even intriguing, enough to create what feels like a vision of a future that is in some ways already upon us. Considering last week’s news that we’re on the precipice of causing the mass extinction of ocean life, Lyon’s work as a whole serves as a visual prompt to consider more seriously the havoc humankind is wreaking on this planet.
Images from Exodus and Timeout are on view at Somerset Housein London through April 22.
