To A Land Unknown

To a Land Unknown examines Fanno Creek as a contested landscape shaped by Indigenous displacement, settler expansion, ecological transformation, and development, revealing how power, memory, and land use inscribe layered histories onto a single terrain.

To a Land Unknown is an ongoing photographic project examining Fanno Creek, an urban watershed in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, as a contested landscape shaped by Indigenous displacement, settler colonization, ecological transformation, and contemporary development.

Named for a pioneer who arrived via the Oregon Trail after losing his wife and unborn child, the creek’s surrounding wetlands were drained for agriculture, imposing private ownership onto land inhabited for millennia by the Kalapuya people. Today it flows through corporate campuses, industrial zones, and dense suburbs, carrying both environmental consequences and largely obscured histories.

Walking the creek repeatedly across seasons, I photograph sites where past and present converge: remnants of earlier ecosystems, traces of human passage, and spaces that oscillate between domestication and wildness. Rather than illustrating history directly, the work approaches the landscape as a psychological terrain shaped by ambition, grief, displacement, and adaptation.

To a Land Unknown considers this overlooked watershed as a microcosm of broader American histories, where myth, memory, and contemporary life remain embedded in the land itself.

This project is made on the ancestral lands of the Kalapuya people.