We tend to use the word “sublime” to mean something that’s exceptionally good, as in “That maple creemee was sublime.” But like its “awesome” cousin, the word’s full definition is bigger and more complicated, encompassing both beauty and terror. To experience the sublime is to sense one’s own powerlessness in the face of an infinite universe.
The phrase “Being Here Now,” the title of this summer’s exhibition at BigTown Gallery in Rochester, might seem like it conveys the opposite concept — something ordinary and prosaic — except that it is currently summer 2025, when beauty and terror are both available in abundance.
The exhibition is the third in BigTown’s series examining how photography shapes our understanding of past, present and future environments. Gallery owner and curator Anni Mackay had planned to start the series in 2020, but it was delayed due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, threats such as climate change seem to be accelerating. “This technically should have been the ‘future’ segment,” she said, “but what’s future is now present.”
The six artists in the show each display works that convey the on-the-brink-ness of the current moment. They touch on the environment, scientific advancement and destruction, both violent and entropic. Some of the artists take a journalistic approach, while others are themselves integral to the work they’re documenting.
One is April Surgent, 43, who lives and works in Washington State. In 2016, she joined scientists as a field biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, which took her to the Pearl and Hermes Atoll, remote islands in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, some 1,200 miles northwest of Honolulu.
Surgent’s 8-by-8-inch pinhole photographs convey both the absolute isolation of the place — the artist was one of only three people on the expedition to the uninhabited islands — and the inescapability of civilization. Photos of a sleeping sea turtle and monk seal show the animals’ vulnerability, while pictures of trash washed up on the beach signal just how doomed their home really is.
Alongside the photos, Surgent presents cameo-etched images in glass. The process is similar to the one 19th-century jewelers used to make cameo brooches from shells. Surgent scraped back layers of white over dark glass to create a dreamy, slightly blurry, wholly tactile surface that aches with memory. The birds, people, clouds and waves pictured seem like they are already gone.
Cassandra Klos, 34, of Boston also embedded with scientists, in an even stranger and more science-fictional way. Since 2015, she has taken part in multiple space analog simulations. These experiments typically involve living in habitats with other people, as one would on Mars or the moon. Klos’ photographs at sites such as Utah’s Mars Desert Research Station show her space-helmeted colleagues exploring a landscape made alien by their presence — a strange and beautiful reversal.
Photographs by Washington, D.C.’s Jon Brack, 47, peer toward the future by documenting the effects of past scientific disaster. He presents three panoramic photographs taken in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine in 2015 and published by National Geographic on the 30th anniversary of the nuclear disaster. In one, a Ferris wheel rusts where it stands; in another, beds in a pediatrics ward are covered in decay and dust. Workers in white uniforms stand around a midcentury nuclear control room, looking almost bored as they finally decommission the plant. The images are strange in how they position the viewer: The aftermath of one disaster is overshadowed by the war that the we know is coming, as though this debris has been thrown backward in time.
The Russia-Ukraine war gains immediacy in James Nachtwey‘s black-and-white “Kyiv, Ukraine, 2022,” which pictures a woman carrying winter coats and stopped on the front steps of what is presumably her apartment building: It, and the building next door, are almost completely destroyed. Nachtwey, 77, of Hanover, N.H., is a celebrated photojournalist who has won countless awards over his nearly 50-year career, including five Robert Capa Gold Medals.
The photos Nachtwey presents here balance the immediacy of disaster with its stubborn endurance as a fact of modern life across the globe. “New York World Trade Center (With Cross), 2001” is an incredible image, showing the explosive cloud of rubble as the South Tower imploded on 9/11, its neighbor still standing; the cross on a nearby church dominates the foreground, perhaps signaling the role religion played in the attack and its aftermath. It’s an iconic split second — a contrast to his image of a man digging out from under rubble in “West Bank, 2002,” which could just as well have been taken last week.
Emmet Gowin, 84, of Newton, Pa., pictures war from an altogether different perspective. His aerial photographs of the Nevada Test Site show the craters and scars left on the desert by the 20th-century nuclear test program. The toned silver gelatin prints’ richness and warmth lend the scenes a timeless quality, as though the viewer is looking at the Nazca lines or the surface of the moon. These may be the clearest articulation of the sublime in the show: stark but beautiful landscapes where the threat of nuclear annihilation lurks in the craters’ dark shadows.
Odette England‘s images are quiet amid these dramatic neighbors. The Australian British photographer, 50, who now lectures at Brown University in Providence, R.I., presents black-and-white works from her series “Nature Is a Photograph.” In them, the natural and human-made worlds coalesce into something new and more abstract.
In one, a sidewalk tree leans against a stark wall, its form mirrored by a high-voltage tower behind it. In another, vines curve and twist behind the grid of a fence like an organic line graph. Flowers on a woman’s dress merge with the lush greenery behind her as she talks on a phone.
With these integrated landscapes, England pictures environmental change as irreversible but not necessarily terrible. “A lot of what she’s saying is like, ‘We’ve just got to live with what we’ve got now,'” Mackay said.
Putting together this exhibition picturing a place many of us once thought of as the future provoked a realization. “We’re here now, people,” Mackay said. She added: “These are not sensational images. Really, the thing that we have to be doing is figuring out: Where do we go?”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Everything Is Awesome | Six photographers picture the future-present at BigTown Gallery in Rochester”
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2025.
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