Ian van Coller uses photography to examine topics like racial politics in post-Apartheid South Africa and the country’s shifting identity an increasingly globalized culture. Among his best-known works is a series of formal portraits of domestic workers, taken in the homes of their employers. He has also turned his lens to nature, as in photographs taken at the Museum of Natural History in New York City in which he contrasts the idealized and imagined world of Africa with real documentary photographs; van Coller has also captured the environmental devastation of American copper mines and the melting glaciers of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.