False Summits

What do you expect the American West to look like? And how much truth is left in the tropes we’ve come to expect? False Summits examines the filter that the typically romantic imagery places between a viewer and reality.

The images we see of the landscape inform what we know about it, and those preconceptions inform what we see.  The focus here is not to reveal the “real” American West but to make the viewer consider how manufactured the West that they might know through photographs is. With fact and fiction interwoven in the region's visual narrative, it is often imagined with a romantic facade.  The project comes from deep care for the land and this moral standpoint: that the chronically American condition of nostalgia provides a front much more idealistic than is justified.