Lost America

The images are rooted in a specific time and place, yet their value rests upon the peculiar, alienated vision that finds the aesthetic in “de-aestheticized” spaces – ruined buildings, abandoned shop windows, surfaces with ripped and layered radical political posters, their words decontextualized, recontextualized by unintended, random juxtapositions.  There is no historical explanation, the project is not about documenting American architecture. There is no text to which the photographs are an adjunct. Any metaphysical “narrative” is meant to follow from the properties of the photographs themselves.    

 

There is a sense of what “was,” but the image of ruin here exists as a formal study with the power to intrigue, to challenge. The photograph can fix a certain space at a certain time (Dudley Square in Roxbury during the late 1970s, as a prime example), yet my intention in the photograph is to transcend that time. There should be a sense of wonderment at what the image itself is, what it has become.

 

My intention was to convey a sense of the ephemeral human presence. These abandoned objects and depopulated spaces come into their own bereft of human presence and agency. The road offered epiphanic moments of emptiness, moments when the image created the sublime from the ordinary. A built object with its naïve proclamations can seem engulfed by surrounding nature. In the unceasing transformation of our planet, nature is always poised to reclaim what humans have made. When people are no longer in the picture, what they have created hovers at a vanishing point. What is left when we are not (there)?

 

Sections:

 

  1. Roxbury

  2. Cambridge

  3. Southern Dreams: North Carolina; Melbourne, Florida; New Orleans area

  4. Three Places in New England: Danbury; Walden Pond; Montpelier area

  5. Archean motifs: Blue Hill Bay, Maine. Granite free forms