No Man's Land

“No Man's Land” is a psychological portrait of the interior lives of men who inhabit a small mythic art town in the far west Texas desert. It interprets the modern quest for American masculine freedom as a multifaceted and entropic endeavor.

Marfa, Texas, began as a ranching community with a train depot that transformed into a military base throughout both World Wars, then a minimalist art mecca, and eventually a performative tourist oasis with a housing crisis. Located in the Chihuahuan Desert, 200 miles from the nearest city and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, its population of 1800 people belies its larger-than-life reputation built on the mystique of John Wayne, Donald Judd, James Dean and big-skies-and-cowboys blockbusters. In reality, it comprises ranchers, writers, artists, drifters, service workers, border patrollers, park rangers, adoberos, activists, rocket scientists, retired billionaires, musicians, chefs, land developers, small business owners, and a swinging door of visitors who share, by choice or circumstance, a common experience of scarcity and expansiveness in a place many call "the middle of nowhere". Locals describe this "nowhere place" as a state of mind; a purgatory; a bardo; a vortex; a desert island of misfit toys; an open-air asylum; an impossible dream.

I see it as a place historically built by men, for men; where men continue to seek something greater than themselves — a "lone wolf" ideology advertised as freedom of body and spirit— or hide from the world in plain sight. A land of seekers and outlaws.

After living in this town for three years and closely observing its peculiar social dynamics and power structures, I began photographing the living quarters of male-identifying residents, searching for evidence of how American masculine freedom manifests in private space. What I found was a multiplicity of reckonings from one door to the next: profound racial and cultural tensions, vulnerability, aggrieved entitlement, misogyny, self-sufficiency, stewardship, spiritual inquiry, nostalgia, queerness, creativity, community, rage, refuge and impunity intermingling in the widest open spaces — the logical conclusion of rugged individualism's oldest promises; the center that will not hold. These images and diptychs reimagine Marfa as a surreal archaeological site where nationalistic, patriarchal conceptions of freedom expand and dissolve into a collective internal landscape.

Since this project began, one of these men married his house; another set his on fire.