Fractional Landscape

I began this project in 2019, a few months before my mother died after her almost 20-year descent into Alzheimer’s. Although I didn’t set out to create images about that time in our lives, the photographs nevertheless spoke to it in a fundamental way.

As an ongoing project, Fractional Landscape attempts to offer an analog to the sense of anxiety, loss, and rootlessness many of us feel as we confront multiple breakage points in the worlds we inhabit and find it impossible to form a coherent vision of ourselves and our experiences. The work 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.

Here, I am working 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 innovations in AI and digital imaging. 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 as I move through and across these sites.