Dillon Marsh is a South African photographer that created a unique project called “Gold”, his fourth project that utilizes CGI techniques as part of the photographic series titled “For What It’s Worth”.
Dillon Marsh explored a significant part of South Africa’s history related to the mining of natural resources such as copper, gold, and diamonds, and the effect this has had on the land over time. He used CGI to create a scale model of the total amount of gold extracted from each of the seven Witwatersrand Basin goldfields. For context, the Witwatersrand Basin is a geological formation responsible for almost half the world’s gold reserves. Marsh’s enormous gold spheres are juxtaposed against the land from which the gold is produced. The result is a poignant series of photographic images that speak loudly about our capitalistic demand for gold.
Marsh’s work often isolates and emphasizes specific features of particular landscapes, from suburban areas to more desolate rural scenes – usually elements that illustrate how we as a species engage both deliberately and unintentionally with the world around us. In recent years, he has also introduced computer-generated imagery into his photographs in an attempt to reveal underlying features or dynamics that can’t be illustrated with photography alone.