©Yogan Muller, Mirror (Telotype #3), Muirfield Road, Los Angeles, October 2019. From the series Telotypes (2019-2023).

Marking one year of Overshoot. The column launched on Lenscratch on March 30, 2025, with a simple premise: we are living in a time of ecological overshoot, and photographers are uniquely positioned to produce meaning in this ever-changing moment.

In the context of accelerating climate change, artists, curators, and writers have launched deep inquiries into our environmental peril. A renewed consciousness of what we’ve done to the natural world has solidified, and photography has become an agent of change in every sense of the word. 

In Overshoot #6, Siobhan Angus shared some of the most salient conclusions one can read in Camera Geologica. An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024). Angus’ book brings the minerals that have made photography the medium and practice it is to the fore. Whether it’s silver (analog photography) or rare earth metals (digital photography), Angus refreshingly reminds us that a global, extractivist infrastructure is mobilized every time we go “click.” 

In her ongoing series, Supernatural, Liz Miller Kovacs (Overshoot #9) creates photographic tableaux where a draped female figure poses in front of large-scale mining operations. Open pits and tailing ponds are recurring motifs. Her draped figure looks particularly vulnerable in the presence of industrial toxicity and the stupendous scales of pits, pushing the viewer to actively consider the planetary ramifications of extractivism. Miller Kovacs indeed traveled to all five continents to develop the series.

Photography and local ecologies have long been intertwined, for example, through the study and exploitation of trees. In Overshoot #5, Alex Turner discusses his multi-year survey of California forests using a thermal camera to capture the heat signature of trees, literally taking the visual pulse of often age-old, iconic California trees such as Sequoias. The thermal camera reveals carved inscriptions underneath the tree bark dating back to the 1860s, which brings us back to survey photography in the American West. After I enjoyed the series at Marshall Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA, last summer, I couldn’t help but see photography enmeshed within the American West landscape, resources, and colonization.

In urban spaces, photography’s instantaneity is a powerful tool to cut through the loud hustle and bustle of cities. Their environment, communities, and expansion have been the predilections of many artists. Walking and photographing the urban landscape, they interrogate architectural gestures, comment on environmental injustice, and deconstruct the manicured nature that dot our cities. In their work, Ryan McIntosh (Overshoot #2), Misha de Ridder (Overshoot #4), Ayda Gragossian (Overshoot #7), Arturo Soto (Overshoot #8), Alexandre Dupeyron (Overshoot #10), and Kaya&Blank (Overshoot #11) have all made the city an agent that continually shifts, molds, and imprints the landscape and people’s lives. With the added complexity of climate change and the increased pressure it puts on resources such as water, cities will remain a critical locus for ecologically-minded photographic investigations.

In the past 10-15 years, magical realism has become one of the most productive modes of photographic inquiry and storytelling. Marine Lanier, who was featured in the inaugural column (Overshoot #1), embraces magic realism to chart the emergence of synergetic scenarios, cosmologies, and relationships with the natural world. Her series and book, Le Jardin d’Hannibal (Poursuite, 2024), conveys both awe and concern for the Arctic flora scientists transplanted at high elevations in the Alps to measure the effects of temperature elevations on plant growth and health. In Lanier’s work, the human, microscopic, and geologic scales collide. As a result, the viewer finds themselves coexisting with a vast array of earthlings, materials, and spaces. And while grief is palpable in her portraits, it’s a force that grounds and mobilizes rather than petrifying us.

Through their personal work, courses, and the Canary Project, artist duo Sayler/Morris (Overshoot #3) have been educating younger generations for well over 25 years, deepening their understanding of and engagement with ecological issues. As an educator, I believe this act of transmission is crucial. For me, it begins with a humble reminder to students: humans coexist with millions of plant, animal, and insect species. See a tree? Look up and marvel at the vibrant avian life that animates it. That realization often produces an epiphany that can change lives. And if students later manage to capture such epiphanies in their pictures, they have the superpower to express radical commitment and perhaps mobilize a wider public.

In this new season of Overshoot, I will continue to reach out to artists, curators, writers, and activists, and ask them to tell us about our beloved medium in relation to the ecological crisis. For it is as much a technology that ushered us into the geological picture of the Anthropocene as it is a salient tool for reckoning with this very entry.

I thank all the artists from the first season of Overshoot:

#1: Marine Lanier (https://lenscratch.com/2025/03/overshoot-1-marine-lanier/)

#2: Ryan McIntosh (https://lenscratch.com/2025/05/overshoot-2-ryan-mcintosh/)

#3: Sayler/Morris (https://lenscratch.com/2025/05/overshoot-3-saylermorris/)

#4: misha de ridder (https://lenscratch.com/2025/07/overshoot-4-misha-de-ridder/)

#5: Alex Turner (https://lenscratch.com/2025/08/overshoot-5-alex-turners-blind-forest/)

#6: Siobhan Angus (https://lenscratch.com/2025/09/overshoot-6-with-siobhan-angus/)

#7: Ayda Gragossian (https://lenscratch.com/2025/10/overshoot-7-with-ayda-gragossian/)

#8: Arturo Soto (https://lenscratch.com/2025/11/overshoot-8-arturo-soto/)

#9: Liz Miller Kovacs (https://lenscratch.com/2025/12/overshoot-10-liz-miller-kovacs/)

#10: Alexandre Dupeyron (https://lenscratch.com/2026/03/overshoot-10-alexandre-dupeyron/)

#11: Kaya&Blank (https://lenscratch.com/2026/04/overshoot-11-kaya-blank/)

#12: Yogan Muller (A year in review)

Biosketch: Yogan Muller 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. He sublimates his loss in JPM, an ongoing, manifold project which culminated in a book dummy he conceived, designed, and produced within Penumbra Foundation’s Long-Term Program (Photobooks) in 2024 and 2025. His JPM dummy has been shortlisted and exhibited at the LUMA Foundation during the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, the 2026 Dummy Award (Photobook Museum, Cologne, Germany), and the 2026 Athens Photo Festival in Greece.

In October 2019, Yogan moved to Los Angeles to join the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught photography, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at UCLA 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 (Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and private collections.

Website: www.yogan-muller.com

Instagram: @yoganmuller