MARGEAUX WALTER MAKES self-portraits from which she erases herself, diverting the viewer’s attention toward the landscape.

Hmm…Try again.

Margeaux Walter is a photographer of landscapes altered by her own trespass, rendering them really self-portraits…

That’s not quite it either.

Margeaux Walter, by hiding her face, shows us ours.

Eh.

Margeaux Walter’s pictures are whimsical and spooky, funny and depressing, magnificent and uncanny, warm and icy, awkward and elegant—

Well…

Margeaux Walter takes photographs that only Margeaux Walter could have taken—

Yes—

—and could only have been made in the present age.

Defined how?

The present age: the period during which Earth’s ecological collapse has been broadly understood but only incipiently witnessed, in frightening conflagrations and ominous erosions, surrenders, vanishings.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS INSedimental were taken in landscapes that, in a different context, might serve as months in a Sierra Club calendar or a spread in a National Geographic portfolio: Yosemite National Park, Joshua Tree, Bryce Canyon, the Mojave Desert. In Walter’s photographs the sites retain their natural splendor but bear, in subtle but unmistakable ways, the scars of human despoilation. On first glance they appear beautiful, even idyllic. But something is off.

That something is a human figure: Walter herself. In her previous series, Don’t Be a Square, Walter configured herself into rectilinear poses, attired in colors that matched her surroundings, often making use of a prop that emphasized the artifice of her camouflage: a newspaper, a clothesline, a voting booth. In Sedimental Walter disguises herself more persuasively. She goes undercover: under billowing fabrics on which she has printed digital images of the same landscape. She arranges her own poses in ways that contribute to her concealment. As a pink-and-white orchid mantis folds itself into a blossom, or the bark-colored great potoo freezes into a snag, Walter tucks herself into a human boulder (“Kaleidoscope”); lies slumped, draped in a crumpled, sand-colored sheet, in mimicry of a dune (“Badlands”); or stands erect, her hand in placating imitation of the terminal branch of a lodgepole pine (“Still Standing”).

Walter’s images do something else altogether. They draw you close.

Most of the time the eye detects Walter before the frontal lobe does. You become aware of some disquieting element, something that seems not quite right, but cannot immediately locate the source of unease. Walter leaves clues to her presence, however: a bare foot, fingertips, the visible contours of a bent knee or creased hip that discloses the concealed body. Usually the illusion dissolves within moments but in some instances (“Hedera Helix,” say, or “Strata”) the challenge of locating the human form unsteadies the reality of the natural setting. Is that branch a hand? Is the rock breathing?

Visual languages, like written ones, have their cliches. The cliches of environmental photography resemble those of environmental literature: scolding polemic; a solemn earnestness that demands piety or reverence; dystopia; rosy-cheeked optimism. Walter disavows all these. If her photography can be described as “environmental,” it is not in the sense of landscape or “nature” photography, dominated as it is by idealized, narcotizing images (the rainforest, the mountain range, the bear cub gazing at you across your dentist’s waiting room). Nor does Walter’s work belong to the postcards-from-the-apocalypse genre (the ocean clogged with plastic, the hurricane-mauled house) that, like any images of horror, provoke repulsion and defensive retreat. Walter’s images do something else altogether. They draw you close. They make you want to figure out what is wrong. They don’t shout; they whisper. And they encourage you to whisper back.

We can’t reincarnate the majesty of the world we’ve squandered, we can only honor it. Crudely.

“Epilogue” was made in the aftermath of a wildfire in Yosemite; Walter, posing as a burnt ponderosa pine, covers her head in a posture of mourning, or perhaps alarm. “Cima” was taken in the Mojave after a different wildfire singed and toppled a grove of Joshua Trees. The tufa in “Tufa One” is only visible because Mono Lake had been drained to dangerously low levels, releasing toxic dust from the saline lakebed, and damaging the habitat of three hundred bird species, including a rookery of 50,000 California Gulls, and tens of thousands of Wilson’s Phalaropes, who fly three thousand miles, without stopping, from the saline lakes of South America, to nest there. The lake in “Renewal” and “Underworld,” near the Salton Sea, is dried up entirely, perhaps permanently, due to drought and the diversion of the Colorado River. The wash in “My Other Half” is also dry—except when the rains come, and it floods.

Walter’s presence in these pictures, however benign or comical or restrained, is an intrusion. It triggers the culpability any thinking person feels when confronted with the scale of the injuries we’ve inflicted—even those of us who are not CEOs of oil and gas multinationals, even those of us who try not to eat meat or fly on airplanes (well, not more than necessary), and make sure to lower the thermostat when leaving the house. We don’t belong in these places. We’re awkward. We stick out.

Yet Walter’s pictures also move in the opposite direction. The decorousness of Walter’s intrusions—the fetal boulder in “June,” the awestruck observer in “Tunnel View”— emphasize our antlike insignificance in the face of natural magnificence. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God thundered from within the whirlwind, chastising Job for his egotism, his mistaken confidence in human dominion. “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?…Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth?”

Walter manifests this creeping sense of inadequacy in “Understudy” and “Balancing Act,” posing as a small rock beneath a giant boulder that seems poised to fall onto her. In “Pinnacles,” her meek impersonation of volcanic breccia towers serve as a form of self-ridicule, which reaches its fullest expression in the inflatable-tube-man Joshua Trees and troll-hair tumbleweeds (“Tuft”). When we play God we look like fools.

Walter embraces the silliness of our Job-like delusions of grandeur in the more absurd images, as when she wears a chunky knit cardigan and a crown of fronds to mimic a palm tree (“Oasis”) or a mass of balloons festooned on her leg, in a self-deprecating imitation of a yucca stalk (“Buds”). The joke isn’t on the yucca; it’s on us. We can’t reincarnate the majesty of the world we’ve squandered, we can only honor it. Crudely.

Elsewhere, however, the mimicry poses as longing. In the pairing of “Brush” and “Bloom,” Walter’s bent posture has the penitent quality of a pilgrim bowed in prayer. Pressing herself, arms raised, against the cliff wall in “Sanctuary” or the caverns in the “Tunnel Vision” pair, she is a supplicant, abasing herself in the presence of the divine. We still go to the wilderness, or what remains of it, in search of sanctuary, self-reflection, wisdom, and revitalization. But it is increasingly difficult to ignore the bathtub ring of human presence. Even within the most pristine landscape—at the bottom of a slot canyon dozens of miles from the nearest village—the human element asserts itself. Look down, you see your sneakers. Look back, your footsteps. Look ahead, the stream evaporates in drought, or the floodwaters rise to drown the canyon.

Might we still be able to find beauty, or recreate it, in this fallen place?

Walter refuses to settle on a single interpretation, a synthesis, a message. Thank God. Messages, we have. Walter achieves instead something more difficult, and profound. She asks questions—deeply personal questions, questions for which every viewer must answer alone. What is our own place in all this? How do we mourn what we have lost? How do we go about preserving what’s left? Or is there nothing to do but laugh—laugh until we choke?

Walter opens up yet another, more radical possibility. Her images, besides all their other qualities, are beautiful, joyful, even wondrous. Might we still be able to find beauty, or recreate it, in this fallen place? Might we still encounter purity, freedom, majesty, a sense of the sacred? Might art help to bring these qualities, which we’ve come to associate with untrammeled nature, into a damaged world? Is it not, at the very least, worth the effort to try?

Walter has. Her landscapes might be compromised but the photographs themselves are not. They are elegant, revelatory, conflicted, sad and frightened and buoyant and funny. They are alive. And like the lodgepole-pine-woman they reach out to the future—contorted and fire-blackened, yes, but still standing.