The Great Western Divide

My photographic work has developed out of a desire to make pictures that work within and through a rich tradition of landscape photography of the American West, but also to examine the symbolic, emotional, and historical potential of objects, places, and events.

The Great Western Divide is a project that takes as its subject the 1864 California Geologic Survey, which explored the Sierra Nevada, at that time the last unknown region of the continental United States. For me, this survey marks a transition from a country focused on 'consuming' the landscape (photography being one of the most powerful tools of this consumption), to a country focused on articulating a unified national ideology through the sublime 'cathedral' of nature.

I set out to follow the same route, making photos with a 4x5 inch view camera at night, using moonlight as the primary source of illumination for hours at a time. My intention with this work is to re-enter the emotional and metaphorical world of the first western surveyors, creating crystalline, descriptive images which nonetheless betray a sense of trepidation, exultation, and finally, some sense of loss — re-staging the sensibility of a forgotten world fraught with echoes.