I want to examine the somatic experience of being lost in images and its connection to the experience of losing oneself in a natural space. Mediated through the camera and projected flattened and silvery onto a surface, these images meander like the flow of a river, requesting a slow encounter.

Over the course of a year, I have been photographing along the undeveloped banks of the Charles River as it winds its way behind the housing tracts and commercial strips of eastern Massachusetts. I am drawn to the density of the scene: the way the overgrowth is flattened in the frame into a profusion of detail, of light working its way through layers of translucency and opacity. The natural orders of this space are very different from the rectilinear order of human development. The interconnected life imperatives for water and air and light revolt against the straight lines of the photograph’s boundaries and of the spaces of urban and suburban life just outside its frame.

I believe confronting climate change requires reimagining our relationship to nature, and challenging what meaning we derive from it. I am pursuing a vision of the landscape that favors attention to dense fields over sweeping views, and whose pacing references geological rather than anthropogenic time. I propose landscapes where the viewer is small in relation to an ungraspable and unconstrained space, where the eye can be only a witness to the complexity and variation that structure an ecology.

Sept. 2020 —