Behind a Little House (A), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (B), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (C), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (D), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (E), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (F), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (G), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino Behind a Little House (H), 2008 Photo: Manuel Cosentino

It seems fair to say that most of us have become at least a little bit numb to mother nature's beauty–or at least images of it. A splendid sunset might be good for an Instagram post or an iPhone wallpaper, but it takes the most polished time-lapse videos, the rarest cloud formations, and other scenes of nature at its most aggressively sublime to really capture our attention. Manuel Cosentino, however, has figured out a clever little way to get us to pay attention to the simpler varieties of nature's splendor. He put a tiny little house in front of it.

>It's an intensive study in the ever-changing drama of the natural world.

The subject of each of the photographs in Behind a Little House, currently being exhibited at the Klompching Gallery in New York City, is, ostensibly, the little house the series is named after. It's a small, simple, nondescript structure–almost platonically so–with undecorated white walls and a pale red roof. Cosentino photographs it from a considerable distance; it occupies the same place in the bottom right corner of the frame in each photograph. What's stunning is, simply put, everything going on around it. We see the house in all sorts of different scenes: beneath a wall of fluffy clouds; silhouetted against a setting sun; standing stoically on a deeply overcast day. In some shots, we can hardly see the house at all.

What it all amounts to is an intensive study in the ever-changing drama of the natural world. The house and the sliver of land it stands on becomes a sort of frame behind which simple day-to-day weather, so often ignored, gains a majesty of its own. The photographs required countless visits to the house over a period of two years. Cosentino's background is in film, which isn't entirely surprising, considering the series is, in one sense, a truly epic feat of location scouting. But where he'd once specialized in visual effects–Cosentino embarked on this project in 2008, after wrapping up a Harry Potter movie–here he wanted to let the scene speak for itself. "In my work I want to create a deep bond with the public," he says, "and I think that no amount of digital manipulation could have replaced the hundreds of hours I dedicated to working in the field."

For Cosentino, the series tells a story of sorts. "The first photograph starts the series with a Big-Bang-like explosion and sets everything into motion," he says. "The last is a new beginning–it represents that piece of carte blanche that we are all given with our lives." At galleries, the photographs are shown along with a book filled with empty pages, each bearing a photo of tiny house in its bottom right corner. Visitors are encouraged to draw their own scenes behind it.

So where is this spectacular little house? Cosentino would rather not say. "I prefer it to transcend geographical placement and become an idea," he explains. "We all live under the same sky, after all." All that's left for us to do is to notice it.