Australian artist Murray Fredericks’ new Vanity series is set at Lake Eyre. At its fullest, the lake contains the same amount of salt as the sea. From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Evidence from the western side of Lake Eyre strongly suggests that the present saline depression resulted from a downfaulting in Earth’s surface about 30,000 years ago, which blocked off an earlier outlet to the sea. Water reaching the lake now evaporates very rapidly, and the surface of the lake bed has a thin crust of salt deposited by water that has evaporated.
Fredericks makes the trek to the desert in Lake Eyre’s center where he photographs the sky and water with a large rectangular mirror. You can see his process in the Instagram video past the break. The works are colorful and striking. From the artist:
In these images I find my own, flawed, search for a kind of perfection. Perhaps it is a search driven by my own anxieties or vain attempt to escape the human condition. Standing in the silken water, surrounded only by a boundless horizon, I sense a release, a surrendering as the self dissolves into the light and space.
We first spotted the images on Trendland, where Fredericks told the website:
In the Vanity series, rather than reflecting our own “surface” image, the mirror is positioned to draw our gaze out and away from ourselves, into the environment, driving us towards an emotional engagement with light, colour and space.
See more of Fredericks’ photos in our gallery.