Fractional Landscape

I began Fractional Landscape in 2019, the final year of my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I had long ago realized that the notion of a unified world or self is fraught, but watching this truth reveal itself inexorably in my mother brought it home with an emotional and psychological force I am still confronting.

I’ve continued the project since, to explore my broader experience of natural, built, and social environments, and my attempts to conjure and express these sites in memory and narrative. As so many of us face multiple breakage points in the worlds we inhabit, our ability to form any coherent collective or individual vision of place feels impossible. These images attempt to give viewers an analog for the resulting sense of anxiety and rootlessness. The project also aims to construct an expression of place grounded in my queer experience and the fracturing and fragmentation that attend it—a sense of dislocation and an ongoing need for psychological and emotional wayfinding.

I position this work against 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. 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, and fractures are all made in-camera in real time as I move through and across these sites.