Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller: Tracy Hills

Tracy Hills is a collaboration between LA-based photographers Ryan McIntosh and Yogan Muller in which they explore and document Tracy Hills—a new master-planned community of 4,700 homes being built near the town of Tracy, in the central valley of California.

While the project revisits some of the tropes of the New Topographics era, the work underscores the distinctly twenty-first-century ecological issues that the anachronistic nature of this kind of community seems to deny—unpredictable access to water, elevated heat, wildlife risk, and unsustainable development.

The shared concern that prompted the two photographers to begin documenting this community was not unfounded. A few months after they thought the project was finished, the Corral wildfire swept through the area surrounding Tracy Hills, the aftermath of which they returned to capture. The book brings together images from both photographers, each working in their own distinct style and format, from the community before and after that devastating, but unsurprising, event.

Yogan Muller's work appears in the collections of Galerie Été 78 (Brussels), BnF (Paris), and the Obscura Museum (Metaverse).