You might say Mike Vos has returned from the cold. That could be interpreted two different ways, which is appropriate given his chosen medium: double-exposure photographs.

The Portland artist is recovering from a nasty, persistent head cold, relegating Vos to bed rest following an early-October appearance at Powell’s Books with curator and artist Liza Faktor to discuss his new book, Somewhere in Another Place (Buckman Publishing). “I’d been going non-stop getting ready for the event and exhibition, so I think the cold was just waiting to hit,” he said in an email.

Vos is also back from the cold in a meteorological sense. To make photographs for this book over the past few years, he accrued tens of thousands of miles traveling, often to frigid northern locales like Alaska, Iceland, North Dakota and Massachusetts. “This book took a lot of energy and a lot of time, and I am really grateful for all the experiences that it’s given me, but when I came back from Alaska on that last trip, I thought, ‘I’m done. I’m done with this series,’” he told Faktor. “It just was a gut feeling that I had taken every photo for it that I wanted.”

Cinematic, Romantic, Prophetic

Across its 107 pages, Somewhere in Another Place offers more than just two images continually combined into one, and more than its basic premise of blurring natural landscapes with abandoned human-made structures such as nuclear cooling towers, grounded airplanes or old farmhouses. Within these still images, Vos conjures a sense of motion, as if a movie has been paused while dissolving from one scene and another, or a vivid dream has been extracted from one’s mind. Though Vos has mastered his technique, because these are in-camera double exposures rather than photoshopped pictures, you can feel a sense of experiment and discovery in the work. And while it’s easy to discern a meta-narrative of civilization’s decline and our eventual extinction, the pictures are too subtle and mysterious to seem polemic.

On the cover is a picture I purchased a copy of three years ago, called What it Takes to Maintain, featuring Snoqualmie Falls in Washington (popularized in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), juxtaposed against a bullet-riddled window frame. It both isolates the white falling water and invites the viewer past it, though the window and its curtains, and through another window illuminated behind the first one. More than 20 years ago I interviewed Lynch at his home and studio in Los Angeles. I remember him telling me that while many viewers have literal minds and get angry when things are not specific, “Some people love getting lost and feeling their way out.” This image is somehow both: a very specific, identifiable duality, and yet a picture you can get lost in — a kind of portal.

Vos begins and ends the book with pictures of the Pacific Northwest, including an image on the last page of the iconic modernist circa 1971 Weyerhaeuser headquarters by architect Edward Charles Basset outside Seattle, which has now been vacated. Yet in between, the book takes viewers around North America: to Vermont and Utah, British Columbia and Florida, Rhode Island and New Mexico, Texas and Michigan. In almost every case, though, the terrain, be it architectural or natural, is hard to identify. That’s by design; these are not postcards. Yet the feeling the pictures conjure is shared across the book’s pages: a simultaneous cautionary tale and sense of the sublime.

A 38-year-old southern California native, Vos began his career as a musician, continually touring and playing shows, before eventually turning to a photography career. In a certain sense, he never left the road. But his transition to visual art was part of a larger journey: away from a music career that he felt had plateaued, as well as from the environmental activism that had come to feel too performative and perhaps even futile. “I really analyzed: ‘What’s the most important thing to me?’ It was my connection to nature, and it feeling like a sanctuary,” Vos explained. “I really started to think about, ‘How do I communicate this idea to other people?’ I wanted to keep telling stories in the way that I made my music.”

Half the equation in Vos’s double-exposure images is a reverence for nature that brings to mind the Romantic-era paintings of Germany’s Caspar David Friedrich (being celebrated this year on the 250^th anniversary of his birth) as well as America’s Hudson River School. Those artists were painting during the Industrial Revolution, with its choking smokestacks and often inhumane, Dickensian conditions, making their pictures a kind of escape. Vos’s pictures, on the other hand, view nature with a not-dissimilar secular spirituality, yet confront humanity rusty, sagging detritus head-on.

Reading the Situation

As the artist explained at Powell’s, it took years to refine his approach and its underlying ideas. Vos had been particularly inspired by Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us, “a very science-based analysis of what would happen to a civilization/building/city that wasn’t maintained by human intervention,” the artist explained. “I started to imagine, this kind of fictional future. If humans weren’t here to maintain the cities that we live in, what would happen during that time?”

Vos even exchanged messages with Weis, who reminded him that this decline actually wasn’t fictional: “It’s so gradual that maybe we don’t notice it. But a lot of these places that I travel to photograph, you can really start to see those effects.” Originally this body of work was called Someday This Will All Be Gone, a more explicit reference to the end-of-Anthropocene theme.

Inevitably, Vos’s work also became about climate change, even as he remained wary of political statement. Traveling over the years to certain far-north locales multiple times, he could see how glaciers had receded. If human-made structures were decaying, so too was nature itself. “I started to think a lot more about not just this theoretical future, but what is happening now and the way that I can communicate this feeling and this urgency to people, not in a direct or confrontational way but just kind of sharing my emotional experience of visiting these places,” he told Faktor and the Powell’s audience. “How can I communicate that through an image?”

Vos, an avid reader, also became influenced by literature. At the end of Somewhere in Another Place, one page before an index of the images’ titles and where they were shot, is a list of novels that inspired him: by Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami, Albert Camus and Italo Calvino, Flannery O’Connor and Clarice Lispector, W.G. Sebald and Virginia Woolf. If The World Without Us had given Vos a foundational idea to inspire his pictures, these books reinforced the importance of ambiguity, poetry, mystery: not quite spelling everything out so explicitly.

“I just started to form this kind of shift in what I was trying to say. I wanted to touch on things that are beyond just the two-dimensional image: the emotional experience. How do I nonverbally have a conversation with people? I wanted to leave it open to interpretation, because I want people to have individual experiences,” Vos said. “I wanted to kind of take a step back and relinquish control a little bit, and just allow the work to speak to people the way that it does. People will ask, ‘What does this image mean to you?’ But I didn’t want to tell people how to feel.”

Forming the Pictures

Vos shot the Somewhere in Another Place photos with a 4×5 view camera that was manufactured in the 1970s. To make a double exposure, he would photograph one place, carefully remove the sheet film, note its subject, and then save it until a second subject would seem right, then photograph it using the first sheet film. Yet the process still required leaps of faith. Vos never saw either image before combining them, and the amount of time taken between shooting the first and second exposure varied.

“I’ll photograph a place and I’ll start to think, ‘What do I want to say with this place, and what conversation does it have with another landscape?’ Sometimes it’s the same day that I photographed the second exposure. Sometimes it’s a lot of time in between those exposures,” he explained at the Powell’s event. “The longest I’ve ever gone was two years. I made a few photographs when I drove out to MASS MoCA [The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] for a residency, drove back to Oregon, and then a couple years later, I was given another residency at MASS MoCA, drove back out and I shot the other exposures. I didn’t intend for that weird symmetry, but that’s just what ended up happening.”

It took time for Vos to get the pictures to look good. For example, the double exposures needed at least one of the two images to be “simple and recognizable. If I made two exposures in my camera that were a little too chaotic, people didn’t really connect to it as much, because there wasn’t anything there for them to hold on to. I feel a similar sensation when I read books by surrealist or magical-realist authors. There has to be something there that is factual and real to hold on to,” Vos explained. Once grounding the artwork with one simple image, usually the human-made structure or object, “then I could expand and explore the more mystical or magical properties of that.”

Vos went through trial and error learning to balance not just the double compositions but their light levels. In many early works, one layer was too faint and the other too dark. But once he figured out the light-meter calculations,  “I was able to start photographing from a gut feeling, and that was huge. It really blew the door open to be able to work instinctively.”

Working methodically with a large-format analog camera on a tripod also forced Vos to slow down. Today many of us take many photos of even the most mundane, fleeting everyday experiences: meals, pets sitting on our laps. “There’s a use for that. I like that. But I really like the patience that comes with setting up my camera and getting everything situated,” the artist added. “Also this film is extremely expensive, so if you waste it, that’s bad. It’s a motivation to be really intentional with the work.”

Yet Vos also couldn’t be too intentional. Often when he approached a location with a specific vision of the photograph to be taken, “it didn’t come out that way. It was the ones that I kind of made on the cuff with an instinctual feeling that were more successful and people responded more strongly to,” he said. “So most of the images in this book were places I didn’t intend to go but I just ended up. I used to travel a lot when I was young, before I was a photographer, so I’m used to finding certain types of places and knowing where to look for certain things.”

He traveled to several national parks to make work, and found some of his greatest inspiration far north, in the Arctic and Alaska. “I would go there and I would just figure it out. If I planned it too much, then it just got too muddy and it didn’t really feel as exciting to me,” he added. “So I wanted to just let things happen the way that they did, and that chaotic part of it was a huge boost in interest for me.”

Making Connections and Moving On

Though traveling and taking these photos has been largely a solitary endeavor—especially since most of them were shot in 2021—Vos has also been moved by the human connections along the way. At Powell’s he particularly recalled traveling to Alaska for that final set of pictures, talking to scientists on the ferry and later meeting a pilot who invited him on a flight to a glacier, where one of the book’s double-exposures was taken.

“It really changed the way that I not just perceived the world, but the way that I thought people perceived me while I’m traveling,” he told the Powell’s audience. “ It’s like people just coming up and being like, ‘Hey, come out on my fishing boat, come hang out with me.’ In a way that’s a little bit confusing for me, because my work is the absence of people, and I don’t photograph people at all. It challenged me and it forced me to grow and think about things in a different way. ‘What is the purpose of this work?’”

Even though his pictures have steadily gained Vos more attention, which the book should only increase, Vos has always sensed it may be a mistake to keep doing the same thing indefinitely. Though he’s going to keep taking photos with the 4×5 camera, he is eager to try new approaches.

On an Iceland trip, he experimented with stitching many photos together into large-format images rather than double exposures, and tried his hand at video. At Powell’s, he expressed interest in pairing images with music or audio field recordings. Now that Somewhere in Another Place has been published, “I want to push myself and challenge myself into other ways and other areas,” he said.

This series, while beautiful and kinetic and engrossing, was not just a product but a process for Vos: a way to feel a sense of wonder, which in turn comes through in the pictures. He traveled to many remote locales, seeking not just beautiful landscapes but ghostly man-made monuments of decay, and though building technical expertise along the way, he also had to learn to let go: of tight control and expectations. But after traveling to sometimes unforgivingly cold climates and exhausting himself to the point of sickness, Vos has found great warmth in the connections he’s made, and in the liberation of being able to now look ahead toward new destinations.