Selected Project Statements

Fractional Landscapes

My project “Fractional Landscapes” explores the physical and emotional experiences of moving through natural and built environments, and our attempts to conjure and express these sites in memory.

As ever-smaller bits of information from myriad sources and channels bombard us, split our attention, and ratchet up our anxiety, our ability to form a focused, coherent vision of our worlds is nearly impossible. And because we cannot process it all fast enough, these digital, physical, and emotional impressions collapse, collide, and fracture. The images in this project attempt to depict this aspect of contemporary life and give viewers an analog for the sense of dislocation that accompanies it.

I am also trying to work against an approach to landscape photography that emphasizes grand vistas; a sense of access, exploration, and visual ownership of sites; and a technical, hyperreal perfection made possible in part by rapid innovations in AI and digital imaging. At the same time, I want to avoid a romanticized look that mimics vintage processes. Thus, I am shooting the series using the panorama function of an iPhone, but in ways that break the smooth, unified, 360-degree images it is designed to produce. The resulting distortions, fault lines, mashups, breaks and bends are all made in-camera in real time as I move through and across these sites.

On a more deeply personal note, the recent experience of witnessing my mother’s long, slow, and deadly descent into Alzheimer’s imbues my work. I have long realized that the notion of a unified world or self is fraught. But watching this truth reveal itself daily, slowly, and inexorably in my mother brought it home with an emotional and psychological force I am still confronting.

Distillation

At its root, “Distillation” recognizes that photography offers an experiment in futility. We attempt to capture a place, a moment, an emotion, by fixing on paper or in digital form that which is always evaporating, always fugitive. This is inherent in all photography: what we photograph ceases to exist exactly as it's been captured the moment the shutter snaps shut.

The images in this project are fragments of larger photographs I've made over decades. By mining my work—using it as a personal archive—I endeavor to rethink, recapture, or “re-remember” something about the sites and how I experienced them. Though abstracted from larger images, these fragments testify, "I was there. I saw this. I felt something."

The title of each image has two parts. The first is a cataloging tag that begins with the designation “EQ.” This is a nod to the seminal “Equivalents” work of Alfred Stieglitz, in which he offered abstract images of clouds as corollaries of emotional experience. “More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state.”1 Each title in my “Distillation” project also contains a word or phrase denoting the context for the image. So, while I hope to elicit the emotional memory connected to the image, and I also want to maintain a link to the place in which I made it. I do not want to erase the fact that I was present in a specific time at a specific place and tried to record it.

Migration Atlas

On May 24, 2001, the New York Times reported that 12 migrants from Mexico were found dead of dehydration and exposure in a remote part of the western Arizona desert, known as the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The group had crossed into the United States on foot, guided by a 20-year-old; in October he pleaded guilty to causing their deaths.

I began Migration Atlas that month, traveling to the Arizona-Sonora border area, from Cabeza Prieta to the eastern Arizona border city of Douglas—almost the full length of the state’s border with Mexico. Many people cross into the U.S. here illegally, on foot or bicycle, and dozens perish each year in the effort. The project records the multiple ways in which that landscape is marked, by traces of human migration and by structures that the U.S. Border Patrol and nonprofit groups have erected. One group, Humane Borders, establishes and maintains sources of potable water in the desert and marks them with 30-foot-high blue flags.

Working with still and video cameras, a global positioning satellite (GPS) device, and maps of private, state and federal lands, I documented a range of markers (water flags, Border Patrol surveillance equipment and cast-off migrant clothing, bicycles, and other possessions). The largest part of the project became the documenting of the traces of migration on the desert floor. Thousands of personal objects (clothing, water bottles, toiletries, etc.) are scattered across the region’s dry riverbeds, washes and trails. I photographed the objects I found from above, and using the GPS device, recorded the longitude, latitude, elevation of each object. In addition, to contextualize the locations and give a sense of the space surrounding the objects (and the space people have been traversing in their migration), I photographed the sky over the object, and the views to north, east, south and west from the object.

The bicycles were photographed at the supply yard of the U.S. Park Service ranger station in Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a desert park that borders Mexico. The rangers collected the bicycles on trails frequently used by people crossing into the U.S. and said the bicycles had been ridden across the border and abandoned in the desert.

The project highlights part of the material experience of crossing into the U.S. and reveals the extended border area as one that is both transitional and transnational. It also focuses inquiry into landscapes as discursive, historical and geographic spaces, while questioning political and cultural notions of borders and border crossings. Pursuing these issues seems critical now, with talk of homeland security, border patrol and the registration and surveillance of “foreigners” so much in the foreground.

There are a few additional key concepts at work for me in making this project. First is the idea of how existing maps elide much of the social and cultural history of a place since they legitimize only certain kinds of sights or paths of travel. Mapping these objects becomes, then, a way to reveal that part of the meaning of this area lies in its being marked by human migration and is constructed through use, which is an ongoing, fluid notion of place identity. I think we are more accustomed to viewing urban locations this way, but not these kinds of wilderness areas. Second, the objects mark this area, extending miles beyond the political border, as one that has multiple claims made on it—i.e., that although the area is part of the U.S., it is also a kind of transitional (and transnational), distopic space. Lastly, I am conscious of wanting to document these objects as means of valuing them, not as ritualized or fetish objects, but as some testament to the life-threatening trip so many people make.