Tracy Hills

In capturing the paradoxically retrograde aspects of Tracy Hills’s “Future Villages,” McIntosh and Muller reveal the essential vulnerability of the structures beneath, forcing the viewer to ponder the fictions of permanence and the facts of entropy. — Britt Salvesen Tracy Hills is a collaboration between Los Angeles-based photographers Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller in which they explore and document Tracy Hills—a new master-planned community of 4,700 homes currently being built in the central valley of California. While the project revisits some of the tropes of the New Topographics era, the work underscores the distinctly twenty-first-century ecological issues that the anachronistic nature of this kind of community seems to deny: unpredictable access to water, elevated heat, unsustainable development. The shared concern that prompted the two photographers to begin documenting this community was not unfounded. A few months after they thought the project was finished, a wildfire swept through the area surrounding Tracy Hills, the aftermath of which they returned to capture. The book brings together images from both photographers, each working in their own distinct style and format, from the community before and after that devastating, but unsurprising, event. Limited edition of this book available here.