Photographer Subhankar Banerjee uses two formats for the photos included in the exhibit Where I Live I Hope To Know at the Amon Carter Museum. One is a snapshot rectangle, just off square, which captures deliberately banal images of overlooked bushes and dusty New Mexico landscapes with little style or romancing. The second format is a long, strained panoramic. Despite their stretched wide presence on the wall, these photos do not communicate an expansive sense, rather the effect is to focus and crop down. An image of the top of a dead pinion tree, populated by the small speck of a falcon perched on the craggy branches, feels microscopically focused, as much about the tree top as the rest of the tree that has been left out of the image. The effect is further emphasized by a few panoramic images that are hung diagonally on the wall, the shape of the photo dictated by the jarring, off balance thrust of a fallen tree trunk, while the installation still references the linearity of the image’s horizon line.

The scientific references are not surprising. Banerjee, Indian by birth, moved to the American southwest to study physics. His photography also possesses a kind of scientific fixation. In the panoramas, subjects – ranging from trees to power lines – feel abstracted from their environment, placed on the wall for our study. Indeed, speaking with the artist about his work, Banerjee points out tiny details in the images the casual viewer might miss. Dripping sap on a tree in a photo’s background, for example, is the evidence that the tree has been attacked by a beetle. It is only a matter of time before the tree will die.

Where I Live I Hope To Know is first and foremost an ecological project, and Banerjee uses his aggressive panoramics and oversized snapshots to illustrate fragile co-dependent relationships in the drought-ridden dessert of Suburban Santa Fe. There are nests in dead bushes, junipers growing up through the thicket of a dead pinion’s branches, and wildlife creating habitats in the shadow of suburban sprawl. In one of the most visually striking images, a long stretch of power lines runs across a seemingly pristine landscape. The image shows the impact of humanity on the environment, but the easement created for the utilities maintain a strip of nature untouched by more invasive development.

All of these ecological subtexts represent both the show’s strength and weakness. Rather than juxtaposing images to generate thematic associations, the show is laid out to simulate a leisurely stroll, reinforced by the artist’s wistfully subjective photo titles. As a result, like a meandering stroll, you can either get caught up in Banerjee’s multi-textured observations on life, death, and predatorial reliance, or just pass them by.