Sarah Ann Johnson, Untitled, People Talking

Sarah Ann Johnson, Burt

Sarah Ann Johnson, Boy In Field

Sarah Ann Johnson, Hiking At Night

Sarah Ann Johnson, Mosquitoes 

From Sarah Ann Johnson's 2004 Tree Planting Project.  Also look at her House on Fire series.

"Staging tends to appear at the peaks of the sine wave of self consciously “artistic” photographic practice—Photo-Secessionism, Surrrealism, high Postmodernism—and from Gertrude Kasebier to Jeff Wall, is typically content to illustrate an idea rather than embody a fleeting feeling. [...]

"There must be some peculiar clairvoyance to Johnson’s figuration. When looking at these stiff little artificial worlds so suffused with personal feeling, I screw up like Marcello Mastroianni confronted by the mind reader in Fellini’s 8 1/2. Once the hotel guests have been sufficiently entertained by the blindfolded lady on the dais, Mastraoianni, playing a flim director, turns to the soothsayer’s assistant and asks, “How do you transmit….Can you transmit anything?” It is the essential problem for the photographic arts: How can a medium so thoroughly committed to surface convey an inner life? For Johnson, scale is the secret. An artist for whom nothing is impersonal, Sarah Anne Johnson has forced her social world into endlessly complicating scale, epic into miniature and back out again, like a poet looking for syntactic friction by scraping up against the limitations of meter."

From Tim Davis's review.