False Summits

How much truth is left in the tropes we’ve come to expect in the American West? 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 of False Summits 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. This is approached from a variety of digital and analog methods that distance the viewer from the imagery and subvert the tropes of the American West.  Sometimes, this comes in the form of rephotographing altered prints while other approaches are much more straight forward, like denying the expected horizon line iconic to the vast landscape.  Though critical of the saccharine way that the West is portrayed in contemporary photography, 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.