Water and Power

Pat O’Neill’s rarely screened masterpiece, the exceptionally dense and technically dazzling Water and Power, is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on Los Angeles, “a city that turned land into desert.” Using time-lapse photography and optical printing, O’Neill intertwines technology and ideas, collaging different locales into montages that suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. His genius comes in combining his raw materials in new and increasingly paradoxical ways, posing the relationship between humans and nature as a series of questions rather than offering fixed answers.