I'm interested in the landscape as meditation. At least that's what I said during my first residency. And I am! I really am. But I said that quite naïvely. One of the biggest problems in looking at the landscape is this. Deborah Bright describes the problematic nature of landscape, and proposes a higher goal for the genre.

Landscape imagery has almost always been used to argue for the timeless virtues of a nature that transcends history—which is to say, collective social action. For many art photographers in the modern era, on the other hand, landscapes seem to be little more than stage-sets for private aesthetic experiences captured on film. As Lewis Baltz writes in a recent issue of Aperture,

The landscape…seems more a set of conditions, a location where things

and events might transpire rather than a given thing or event in itself;

an arena or circumstance within which an open set of possibilities

might be induced to play themselves out.

But landscapes needn’t serve such meager ends. If we are to redeem landscape photography from such a narrow, self-reflexive project, why not use it to question the assumptions about nature and culture it has traditionally served? Landscape is not the ideologically neutral subject many imagine it to be.

So this, my friends, is an attempt to do just that.