On Hills

I make bodies of work about conflicts between desires to cooperate with the landscape and attempts to dominate it. I use photography to look for tenderness, absurdity, and vulnerability in the built landscape of Southern California.

In my ongoing project On Hills I look for vulnerability, tenderness, and absurdity in the built environment of towns and cities, and the conflicts between desires to cooperate with the landscape and attempts to dominate it. My body of work is concerned with matters (and manners) of land use and the people who inhabit the domesticated landscape. I seek to use photography to document the ways in which we, as individuals and as a collective, respond to the norms and structures of our built environment.

On a personal, private scale, I look at peoples’ yards, gardens, and homes. I use the space of a shared garden, for example, to explore discordant themes of growth and stagnation, loss and gain, loneliness and community. On a civic, monumental scale, I look at water infrastructure, new construction, highways, and lot lines. I document the contrast between the scale of our public works and the scale of individuals in the landscape. How do people conform to or defy collective expectations about what public and private outdoor spaces should look like or accomplish? How do we use our space? How does what we do to the landscape bring us together or keep us apart? I aim to offer answers to these questions with my work and use photography as a tool for wonder. 

My practice is rooted in straight photography. I use large-format because it is a generous medium that allows me to keep all the tiniest details of the landscape and make immersive, wall-sized prints. It gives me more than I ask for. When I am framing an image in-camera and making decisions about light, distance, and scale, I am brokering a taut and vibrant peace between the nouns (persons, places, things) that inhabit the picture, and I am pleased. When I am taking a picture I am thinking: I am making something, and I want to use the specific power of photography to make something that is intricate, detailed, dense—something that rewards close and careful looking.