LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller: Tracy Hills by Linda AlterwitzJune 19, 2026

art; science; nature; technology; book review

Tracy Hills by Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller © 2025 Radius Books, documents the construction of a master-planned community in California’s Central Valley near San Francisco from 2021-2024. Both photographers approach the subject through shared concerns about ecological threat: the loss of farmland and habitat, drought, wildfire, elevated heat, and unchecked development. The photographs reflect trauma created upon the land through environmental instability and expansion.

I asked Yogan why they chose the Tracy Hills development to photograph when there were many developments popping up everywhere across California. Yogan replied, “Tracy Hills happened to be on Ryan’s route after a trip to San Francisco in July 2021. We had met a month prior. When he was back in L.A., I visited him and brought prints of my then developing Telotypes series as well as landscape work I made in Iceland between 2014 and 2017. Then he sowed me maps of Tracy Hills and suggested we go there together to explore. We didn’t have a project in mind. We simply wanted to have fun photographing. Unbeknownst to us, we returned over and over to Tracy Hills. It was a huge playground and a place where we felt we could further the conversation that the New Topographics laid forth 50 years ago.”

Because both artists are photographing within a close proximity, the images share a visual language of building materials and equipment, power lines, words, words and numerical markings on surfaces, scorched plants, plowed earth, and traces of fire and regrowth. Yet they found their own ways to interpret the landscape.

Housed as two separate books within a single slipcase, the publication shows the artists’ contrasting photographic processes. Muller works in color using a digital camera, while McIntosh uses an 8×10-inch view camera to produce handmade silver chloride contact prints in the traditional wet darkroom. The publication also includes contributing essays by Britt Salvesen and Greg Foster-Rice.

A few months after the project was thought complete, a wildfire swept through the area surrounding Tracy Hills. Both artists returned to photograph the aftermath. The final sequence brings together images made before and after the fire, revealing wildfire not as an isolated event, but as a consequence of building within an increasingly vulnerable environment.

art; science; nature; technology; medical imaging

Ryan McIntosh is a Los Angeles-based artist and photographer. He received their MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and BFA from University of Arizona. Ryan works exclusively with the 8″x10″ and 11″x14″ large format view cameras, committed himself to the masterful craft of producing only handmade silver chloride photographs. All photographs are hand crafted in a traditional wet darkroom utilizing only vintage photo paper and chemistry dating as far back as the 1940’s. Nearly twenty years since making his first photograph, Ryan continues working primarily in the natural landscape, with an ever-growing level of concern and awareness towards the landscape and how it’s conveyed today to fit into the contemporary consciousness and evolving dialogue. His primary focus in photography is exploring mankind’s impact on the natural environment and the relationship humans have with the remaining wilderness on our planet.

Instagram: @ryan.e.mcintosh

Yogan Müller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impact on landscapes, resources, and communities. Research, critical approaches to landscape, fieldwork, and design are central to his process. He works with photography, photogrammetry, drones, and the book form. After the traumatic loss of his father in February 2022, belonging, identity, and fractured roots are themes that came to the fore. In October 2019, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught photography, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at DMA between 2020 and 2024. In November 2018, he graduated with one of the first practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His work is in the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and private collections. Yogan has taught at UCLA DMA, the Penumbra Foundation in New York, and the University of Bordeaux in France.

Instagram: @yoganmuller

Linda Alterwitz is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. Her work homes in on visualizing unseen systems that shape our world, encouraging dialogue around choice, trust, and collective experience. She has been an editor for Lenscratch Magazine since 2015 and is currently the Art + Science editor.

Instagram: @lindaalterwitz

Tags: Architecture, Environment, Photography Book, Photography Books, Ryan McIntosh, Yogan Muller