In the early 20th century, settlers in the state of Western Australia began clearing the native vegetation from vast swaths of land in order to plant oats, barley, and wheat, the last of which gave the region its nickname, the Wheat Belt. The region prospered, but the clearing of vegetation had an unintended consequence: Without deep root networks to soak up rainfall, water was able to filter down to massive salt deposits below the surface. When the water table rose, that salt came to the surface and began increasing the salinity of the Wheat Belt's ground.
By the turn of the 21st century, farmers were losing hectares of once-arable land to salinization. The government responded with a $1.4 billion "National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality," but it ultimately proved insufficient to cope with the continuing encroachment of salt on farmland. Photographer Leah Kennedy documented the region's resulting salt lakes in her series Salis.
The salt lakes predate human settlement, but over the past hundred years so-called "secondary salinization" has made the lakes’ natural chemistry even more extreme. These conditions also produce lakes that, when viewed from above, throb with extraordinary shades of rust, lemon yellow, pink, lavender, and bright green.
Kennedy captured aerial images of the lakes from a small Cessna flying about 5,000 feet above the ground. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might think they were elegant works of abstract art. "Salt has both negative and positive associations," she says. "From the agricultural point of view, salt is not a good thing, but on the flip side of that, salt lakes can be quite biodiverse places." Contrary to the popular notion that salt lakes are "dead," scientists have actually found hundreds of species of invertebrates thriving in high-salinity Western Australian lakes.
All of the images in the series, which is named after the Latin word for salt, were taken in an approximately 350-mile radius of Kennedy's current home city of Perth, encompassing coastlines and inland lakes. Both she and her pilot were struck by the resemblance between the landscape and Aboriginal art, much of which is highly abstract. "The lakes looked quite primitive and ancient," she says. “It was uncanny to see that relationship.”
Like most of Kennedy's work, the salt lake photographs are devoid of people. Even when she's shooting human-constructed environments, humans are usually absent. "I wouldn't say I've purposely gone out of my way to exclude humans," she explains, "it just seems to be what I gravitate towards. It adds a surreal aspect to the images, which appeals to me. You question whether they're real or not."
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