The Rapture Of: statement
Throughout its history photography has played an important role in popularizing the ideas of the sublime landscape, Manifest Destiny, and the ‘land of opportunity.’ It is my intentions with this series to explore those ideas within the genre while describing a more complex vision of the American landscape. I am interested in exploring our complicated and often uneasy relationship with nature-- our presence in it, dominance over it, reverence for it, and our need to control it.
This work is shot on film with a large format camera and all manipulations are done in camera. Like many photographers before me, I focus my lens on the serene and picturesque, but unlike most of them I am not interested in reinforcing the myth of the untouched land by adjusting my frame to exclude man or the man-made. Instead its presence is recorded to film to be later removed by the same means with which it was recorded, light. This is achieved through a series of multiple exposures-- one of the scene, and a subsequent exposure shot in the studio for each burst of light. It is my hope that the resulting images appear simultaneously familiar & foreign, as well as both celebratory & critical. By erasing the presence of the man-made in a way that draws as much attention to itself as it withholds, it is my hope the work offers pause for one to contemplate our relationship with the earth we live on and question the classic notions of expansion, monumentality, and nostalgia in landscape photography.