Kaya Blank, from the series Second Nature, published by Kehrer in 2022. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

Yogan Muller:

Let’s start with your current show at Basis, in Frankfurt, Germany, and then work recursively to Second Nature, which is how we first connected. The title of the show, Infrascapes, points to what lies beneath neoliberal capitalism’s 24/7 global operations. Tell us about what’s on view and how you curated this major show.

Kaya & Blank:

On view are projects that combine video work with photographic objects. We show pretty much everything that we’ve been working on in the past 5 years.

As you said, the show focuses on the infrastructure that supports the neoliberal world we live in. It is the force and system that propels the goods we consume and that fuels our lifestyle.

Also, as part of our collaboration with Basis, we will show our Second Nature series at a satellite venue in Darmstadt, a neighboring city. We obtained funding from a regional fund that supports artistic collaboration among cities in the region. We thought of Darmstadt because it’s the closest city to where Thomas grew up. He’s been a member of an artist association there, so the city has this biographical component for him.

Kaya & Blank, exhibition walkthrough, Basis, Frankfurt, Germany. Courtesy of the artists.

Yogan Muller:

To me, night operates as a clarifying lens in your work. I am curious to know what first compelled you to work at night in Southern California, a region known for its sunlight.

Kaya & Blank:

That definitely is Işık’s focus. She came to the United States after having worked on a photographic series about the construction boom in Istanbul, Turkey. It radically transformed the city that she knew so well. Construction was going on 24/7. At night, the construction sites had a different quality; they almost looked like staged situations: strange forms and shapes became more noticeable, features one would overlook in daylight. When we started working together on joint projects, the first few ideas she had were informed by this nightly framing of the urban space.

©Kaya & Blank, from the series SO2F2. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

You’re right, California is known for its sunshine. But when you start living here, you also see the massive light pollution happening at night. Because all of Southern California is just one giant metropolitan region, there’s so much light that emanates from the urban space. It’s impossible not to be in awe of this spectacle. Whether it’s the highways that are so massively lit or the cities themselves, the city blasts so much light back into the night sky, and if you’re close to the coast, the Pacific layer keeps really close to us.

©Kaya & Blank, from the series SO2F2. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

So, we figured nighttime capture still worked for what we wanted to focus on here in California, which happened to be the infrastructure that, as you said, operates around the clock.

For us, this nightly, strange quality of images that are slightly enhanced compared to what you would see with the human eye exudes a mystery that is, on the one hand, haunting and maybe eerie, but at the same time, beautiful. We like working with this tension you get by creating slightly otherworldly images that still look familiar.

Yogan Muller:

One often wonders how you gained access to certain sites, especially at night. Have you ever been approached or questioned while working?

Kaya & Blank:

We operate from public grounds 100% of the time. We only very rarely go somewhere where we need permission to operate. We like the idea of finding images that are accessible to everybody.

©Kaya & Blank, Intermodal, installation view, Cermak Center, Chicago, IL, USA, 2024. Photo: Jonas Müller-Ahlheim.

In addition, going through the administrative process of gaining access to places is sometimes expensive, and we don’t think it’s worth it. We like working with a certain degree of restriction as it pushes us to come up with other ways to frame our subjects. Sticking to public grounds forces you to look and pay attention more precisely.

For our latest project, Bloom, we were filming in rural Ohio. We actually had somewhat funny encounters with police forces in quiet rural communities where usually nothing happens. They were almost excited that somebody was there. Because it is very different from a metropolis like Los Angeles, where you can tell that the police have to deal with a whole different set of calls or a whole different set of security concerns, while being in New Bavaria, Ohio, the police were more, “Oh, hey, finally something’s happening!”

Yogan Muller:

I find it fascinating that you incorporate the environmental markers of our industrial hubris into your photographic process. For example, human-made leaves from concealed cell antennas appear in your installations, and water you collected near Long Beach is used to make salt prints. In other words, you’re not just making work about the ecological crisis. Your work is made of the very byproducts of the said crisis. What have you learned through this deep entanglement with your subjects?

Kaya & Blank:

One thing that we really enjoyed while working on our recent show in Frankfurt was collaborating with writers. That gave us a little bit of distance from our own practice, because obviously, when you’re making things, you can only get so far away from it.

©Kaya & Blank, collected artificial leaf from a concealed cell antenna, from the Second Nature series. Courtesy the artists.

For us, it has been logical to try to combine the video work with the actual materials that we depict in those images that feel so disembodied. We always struggle to find a proper word for that, but a projected video in an exhibition space just doesn’t have the presence of an actual object.

Luckily, photography is a wide, wide field of processes that allows the use of all kinds of materials, either in the actual photographic process or by combining these in an installation, as you mentioned with the collected leaves.

While working on the show at Basis, Deb Chachra, who published a wonderful book called How Infrastructure Works (Riverhead Books, 2023), wrote an essay about our work in which she points out how we simultaneously address two layers of the same system. One being what she calls “charismatic megastructures,” like the Port of Long Beach that’s the subject of Intermodal, and the other being the traces left behind by material flows, a grinding of sorts if you will. I don’t think we’ve ever thought about what we do this way. As we circulate all of these goods and all these resources, traces of them detach and are found in waterways, shrouding the atmosphere, etc. Up until our show at Basis and Deb’s essay, we’ve been trying to show both: we turn our lens to systems one can easily overlook because they’re so big, and that are simultaneously scattering traces one can easily overlook because they’re so small.

Having both micro and macro scales within the same installation has been at the core of our artistic strategy and practice for years. For the first time in Frankfurt, we were able to put several of our projects side by side, read Deb’s take, and have this “aha!” moment. It came full circle.

Yogan Muller:

Your work blends photography, video, installation, sound, and seems more and more to culminate in printmaking, using techniques such as salt prints, which brings us to the birth of photography at the dawn of the industrial age, we’re now completely engulfed in. This is an open question: are you concerned with photography’s environmental baggage?

Kaya & Blank:

Oh, yes, absolutely. The other author and writer we were working with for the exhibition in Frankfurt is Siobhan Angus, whom you interviewed before. She recently wrote a history of photography through the lens of the mine, Camera Geologica (Duke, 2023). We learned more about the imprint that photography and the industry behind everything lens-based have had on our planet. This book has had such a lasting effect on our thinking and practice.

One example she studies is how Kodak realized that cows that eat mustard greens during their upbringing have an increased amount of sulfur, we want to say in their bones. Once you make gelatin out of those bones, the film stock turns out superior. A single example like this goes to show the devastating ramifications of photography. We already have the word “livestock,” which sounds incredibly dystopian. But then you have industrials capitalizing on it and wondering, “Oh, what can I feed these creatures to make better film stock with their bones?” And, of course, there’s the mining of silver that’s been part and parcel of the photographic industry since its inception, which Angus dissects so incisively in her book.

Going to today’s use of photography, which is basically as normal as breathing, we all have incredibly powerful mini computers in our pockets that shape our realities, right? These truthful fictions that we tell each other, that we can take selfies, that we can take photos of where we go throughout the day, … Imagine, all of us have a massive pocket-sized digital photography archive that is entirely based on the extraction of rare earth minerals that have to be mined from somewhere, usually the global south. It’s an area of the world that we tend to keep out of our perception, because, somehow, it feels so easy to focus on how light and sleek these digital devices look and feel. But, again, what’s inside them needs to come from somewhere.

©Kaya & Blank, still from Intermodal, video installation. Image courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

©Kaya & Blank, Intermodal, installation view of Infrascapes, Basis, Frankfurt, Germany, 2026. Grid of salt prints made by the artists. Image courtesy of the artists..

We think about these issues a lot, and they might find a way into our practice and projects in the future. In hindsight, we’ve accidentally followed the history of photography by exploring heliographic prints made from bitumen first, and went on to make salt prints. Now, we might jump to rare earth sometimes soon, who knows?

Yogan Muller: 

Second Nature was published in 2022 by Kehrer. In this series, you turn your lens to cell antennas disguised as trees. They are everywhere in LA. I recall from our conversations during the pandemic that it was an epic project to capture.

Kaya & Blank:

It started as a project of curiosity. Neither of us had ever seen these trees before, and Işık got obsessed with them. They’re so strange when you’ve never seen them before.

Kaya & Blank, from the series Second Nature, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2022. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

We’d take photos of them whenever we would see one on the side of the street, or somebody would let us know, “Ah, there’s one out there, check it out!” But initially, it didn’t go beyond that amusement, and as a result, we weren’t making much progress with the project.

Suddenly, the pandemic hit. Through research, we learned that these cell antennas you can see all around Los Angeles, mounted on buildings or on towers, are geotagged on cell provider maps. You can go online and check where the closest cell antenna is. That said, the downside of these maps is that they don’t show which antennas are disguised as trees or mounted plain and simple on a tower. During the first few weeks and months of the pandemic, we perused those maps and checked every single marker on them, using Google Street View to confirm if it was a tower or concealed as a tree. Over a few months, we put together a custom map that we used to work our way through the urban landscape and photograph them. Overall, we visited close to 1,200 cell towers in Southern California, from the Mexican border to Bakersfield. We created this huge archive of cell tower trees, mostly photographed at night. And then we compiled the final selection edit, which became the book Second Nature, published by Kehrer.

This research-driven process laid the foundation for what we do in our more recent projects: we usually create an extensive visual archive and condense it over time.

Yogan Muller:

We share similar trajectories as itinerant artists, heading from Europe. We call LA home. Do you remember when you felt deeply that LA was where you could thrive as artists?

Kaya & Blank:

We didn’t feel it until we had lived here for a while, to be honest. Işık and I both landed in San Diego first.

Işık got her MFA from UCSD, and Thomas was a Visiting Scholar through a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. That’s how we met. We spent the first years of our lives in San Diego, until Işık graduated. And the funny thing is that we had been to Los Angeles many, many times over the years, but we usually ended up in areas that are not too appealing: industrial parks, the ports, and sites with lots of extractive industries. We actually didn’t want to move to L.A. Işık found a job there, so we eventually did, and, funny enough, the city grew on us. Seeing it as a resident obviously gives you a very different lens on where you are.

As many people have written about Los Angeles and commented on Los Angeles, it is a city of cities. It’s a massive outgrown urban system, and some parts are rough and industrial, while other areas are incredibly beautiful. The great thing about it being such a huge system is that you can find your pockets. We are pretty happy with where we ended up in the city.

It feels like a serendipitous situation that we found something without searching, and we just ended up in a place where we had been happy to be for the last few years.

Yogan Muller:

Is there a backstory behind your Kaya & Blank alias?

Kaya & Blank: 

The very simple backstory is: it’s our last names. We figured Blank & Kaya didn’t sound as nice. Kaya & Blank has a good ring to it. It’s much easier than writing our full names, especially since Thomas has a middle name that’s awkwardly long. Kaya & Blank felt like a catchy name.

Yogan Muller:

What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

Kaya & Blank: 

Don’t forget the sunscreen?

More seriously, it’s a question that we still try to wrap our heads around. Our work sheds light on the infrastructure that has a direct link to our warming world. Yet, we also know these systems maintain our cushy and comfortable lifestyle.

We feel conflicted. On the one hand, we have a deep appreciation for the science and engineering genius behind it. It is sometimes jaw-dropping. For example, if you look at a port, you can’t deny the ingenuity, engineering, and scale. It’s awe-inspiring. On the other hand, we’re well aware of the effects of these systems and the ecological ramifications of their functioning.

That said, we have very clear feelings towards the politics behind it all and how they’re a manifestation of power structures. These systems should benefit all of us, which is not the case. So social justice always hovers around what we do. We bear in mind how our warming world is disproportionately affecting people in the global south. Climate change is much more of a danger to human life in places where weather conditions are changing rapidly. We are feeling it over here as well… Los Angeles saw full-blown environmental disasters lately, too.

We, of course, wish we had a more immediate effect on politics, people’s lives, on collective thinking and action, but there’s a very clear limit to what our work can achieve to change this situation.

Kaya & Blank are lens-based media artists whose work explores the ways in which humans shape and inhabit the world. The influence of neoliberal politics on the way we live has been an important part of their practice in recent years. Their projects often focus on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how humanity’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In their work, they erase the physical distance in between existing structures and create dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time.

Deeply grounded in documentary practices, their approach is characterized by a strong emphasis on research. However, by pushing the boundaries of how reality can be depicted, they transcend the domain of representation and create completely independent, often hyperreal visual worlds. As a result, the boundaries between reality and fiction in their work become blurred. By framing their subjects almost exclusively at night, they aim to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of contemporary urban environments. This visual strategy often has the effect that the documentary parts of the works are interpreted by viewers as computer-generated images.

In exhibitions they turn their research and discoveries into multi layered installations. Photographs and videos are frequently supplemented by texts and objects. Their work often has a direct material connection to the topics depicted in their videos and photographs. By creating these complex, spatial compilations, they offer spectators an immersive experience that in equal measures shows conceptual depth as well as a rigorous formal execution.

Artist website: https://www.kayablank.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaya.blank

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 unexpected 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 appears 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.

Artist website: https://yogan-muller.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yoganmuller/