What is Progress? This is the question that photographer Leah Kennedy asks us with her series entitled “Progress“. 

Leah Kennedy was born and raised in Perth, Australia, and before devoting herself completely to photography she had some work experience in the field of engineering. After spending almost 10 years in Ireland working in this field she decided to return to her native Australia, enroll at Curtin University studying Bachelor of Arts – Fine Arts and Visual Culture and transform her passion for photography into her career. 

Browsing through her portfolio we can see how Leah Kennedy is inclined to travel photography, taking us to places like Iceland, New Zealand, Mongolia, India, but also to aerial photography, through which she captures the play of colors and textures of different territories. 

Among her projects, the one that has attracted our attention the most is “Progress”. The shots taken from above show us glimpses of Namibia, of the areas in the middle, not only between the city and the desert but also between civilization and the absence of life, between the intervention of man and the uncontaminated. 

It is a surreal scenario, in which the human presence is shown only through his interventions, through roads that cut the landscape in two, sheds, small agglomerations of houses that seem abandoned. Leah Kennedy leads us to the discovery of an environment in which structures and connections have been built, but it is not clear for whom. 

Each perspective surveys the relationship between human and nature building tension intended to pose a question: What is progress?