NORMALIZED

A visual critique of consumer capitalism and the routine violence embedded within it. These images expose the externalities that economies are designed to conceal—the waste, the extraction, the displacement, the policing. From landfills the size of mountains to fortified borders, from speculative ghost cities to sprawling refugee camps, these are not anomalies. They are the operating conditions of the system.

Consumption - Large Landfill - Nevada, USA.

One of the largest landfills in the world, an archive of disposable culture. The scale is staggering, yet treated as the cost of convenience. Excess becomes normalized when it’s pushed far enough away.

Crude Spills - Tobago (2024)

A slick of crude spreading across the ocean, treated as an unavoidable side effect of energy extraction. Catastrophe is absorbed into the logic of profitability. Environmental destruction becomes routine, then invisible.

Militarized Borders, Melilla (Spain–Morocco)

A fortified threshold where human movement is met with fences, patrols, and surveillance. Migration which is driven by histories of extraction and conflict, is here reframed as a threat. Security becomes the language that legitimizes exclusion.

Monoculture - Advocado Plantation - Mochacan - Mexico.

An entire landscape converted into a single commodity. Biodiversity erased, water tables depleted, local ecologies subordinated to global markets. Efficiency becomes a justification for ecological amputation.

Ghost Cities, Kangbashi (Ordos), China

Urbanization built as an investment strategy rather than a response to human need. Towers without residents, roads without traffic. A speculative landscape where growth metrics override lived reality.

Massive Refugee Camps - Kakuma (Kenya)

A “temporary” settlement that has become a long-term city of displacement. People uprooted by war, climate collapse, and economic violence are contained in limbo. Human suffering is managed, not resolved.

These images are normal maps: textures used in 3D graphics to simulate how light falls across a surface. They determine what becomes visible and what is lost in shadow.

“Normalized” therefore refers both to the technical act of rendering and to the social act of making violence appear ordinary, inevitable, even necessary.

We normalize abuse by illuminating it selectively, by framing it from angles that render it acceptable.

This is how power naturalizes its consequences, by shaping what we see and how we see it.