My practice operates in a place where two desires collide: one is an interest in American economic and military history and the other is a desire to explore landscapes that captivate me, sometimes because of their associations with said histories, and sometimes for reasons that I can't quite fathom. These ground level investigations have included closed military bases, old empty industrial facilities, human interventions in the iconic landscape of the American west, as well as more specific places, like the site of the explosion of the first nuclear weapon. The photographs are intended as confrontations as much as aesthetic experiences; the immediacy and specificity of the non manipulated photograph is an attempt to get the viewer to regard these often overlooked yet essential spaces and complex histories and patterns of land use as parts of this tangible world, as opposed to distant abstractions; as chunks of our collective history and therefore of their own.
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Most recently, I have been working on a series entitled Dispatches From an Unfinished Landscape. At the core of this work is an examination of parts of a complex relationship that Americans have with the iconic landscape of the American West. I am interested in interventions in that landscape, whether they be as small as a nature mural on a sign or as massive as the Los Angeles Aqueduct. How these interventions integrate with and modify the landscape around them reveals something, not only about our profound impact on the land itself, but about how we conceive of that impact and react to it.
As this work continues, it is taking more of a direction of a reaction to cultural narratives that I have inherited about this landscape. One of these narratives is of the West as a blank slate, a state of undisturbed nature, ready for Americans to expand into and conquer, to tame for their own purposes. A land of extremes, of distance, of weather, of difficulty, but also of opportunity and of beauty. A more recent one, though, is of the West as a fragile landscape that has been thoroughly settled and divided up, it rivers dammed, its resources mined, it's unspoiled natural beauty confined to marked off areas where we allow it to remain. In this narrative, the landscape has been thoroughly digested and understood, we have achieved mastery over it to the point where it is possible for us to act as its protectors and managers.
Though they are opposed in prescriptions, what these two narratives have in common is that they view human modification of the landscape as a imposition on the 'natural', of us as an alien presence in the landscape, for good or ill. This idea of a very definite boundary between the natural and the man-made is an idea that I have been exploring in this work, something that often exists but falls apart in the same spaces. There is an unresolved question here, about our relationship to this land; something mirrored by the sense of mystery and wonder I experience while in traveling and making photographs in it. The West is anything but figured out.