The Precarious Sublime

Photography should do better than this. It loves telling its own big lie: it captures. Somehow for nearly two centuries it has been deceitfully repeating that it isn’t art as much as it is life, that it is a visual nugget of truth, a superfood of the real, that it presents rather than represents. Yet it has a loose, unwritten rule about the presence of people in the landscape. It is and always has been disingenuous at best for an individual to insist that representations of the landscape be devoid of people. We have all done this for so long that we have built for ourselves a ideological wall that keeps us from acknowledging our impact and from shaping our debates and our action. There is no room any more to hide in the Romantic sublime notions of nature. It is impossible to find a place without our visible scars upon it. Even where mankind has tread lightly or not at all those scars are present, falling from the skies or floating on, in, or by the water.

While I cannot entirely escape these traditions I do my best to make my landscapes connect with human presence. It is for that reason that I put a somewhat out-of-place picture at the core of this project. It places me, big, old, mostly hollow and empty, at the center of the landscape. But I am in all these landscapes and I am not alone. I include three works with people in them, others still with faint echos or suggestions of the works of our present footprints. This and my belief that we each create a personalized place identity through the association of one place with others also leads to my use of multiple layers in my work (the only single exposure works here are "Riparian Scene" and “Boy with a Yellow Frisbee at the Gasworks") suggest that both physical landscapes and their representations are made things that combine the new with the known.