SALT LAKE CITY — It is a possibility that's easy to ignore: the Great Salt Lake could dry up. But photographer Nick Pedersen is trying to put it right in front of Utahns — on a couple of billboards.
With a grant from Wake the Lake, an arts initiative sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Salt Lake City Arts, he's created two billboards at 870 South and 900 West showing a thriving Great Salt Lake and a lake that's evaporated.
Pedersen creates imaginary hyper-realistic photomontages addressing environmental issues. He's made a series of images showing landscapes reclaimed by nature and a series of recognizable city scenes halfway underwater because of rising sea levels.
"The images are kind of colorful and over the top," Pedersen said. "But, I really like this phrase amusement enlightens."
For the two billboards, he spent months taking photographs of the lake and its wildlife and then slowly stitching together the pictures into two seamless images.
"It's kind of like a giant, complicated puzzle," he said. "It's like focusing on all these tiny details is what really makes the difference."
Pedersen — who grew up in Utah, moved away and then returned — remembers swimming in the lake when he was a child.
"So, I lived away from Utah for about 10 years, and so I didn't really think too much about the Great Salt Lake," he said. "I just assumed it was doing well and thriving."
Pedersen said moving back and seeing how much the lake had receded was a shock.
"We're kind of hardwired to, as humans, instinctively to react to like immediate threats," he said. "(It's) an idea or concept that's so large that we can't compute it in our brains."
The idea that a lake so large could dry up is almost too big, he said, to comprehend.
"Scientists have been telling us these things for decades but my idea is to visualize it because then … I think it makes it more real in a way," he said. "This just feels like the one thing I can do … to help."
