Introduction
These works derive from visits to Yosemite and the Yellowstone region, locations that offer curious sights and enormous vistas weighted with the history of photography in the American West. While it’s difficult to ignore those big views, I was also interested in the commonplace textures of a more typical tourist experience, and the photographs record my acts of interacting with the landscape: of looking, exploring, and recording my presence within it. In these works my subject matter sometimes explores locations documented by the earliest photographers. Other times it touches on a world they would have had a hard time imagining.
On the technical side, to intensify my dialog with photography's first practitioners, the works in this series employ extreme blue filtration and extended exposures to emulate the response of the wet collodion plates used by the survey photographers. At the same time, I am using modern films and equipment, and the prints now come through digital output, using color profiles I derived from vintage color-shifted albumen prints from 1860s and 1870s Western expeditions. My working method has some built-in easy ironies and interesting contradictions, but my main interests remain in the power of photography to create documents that are both of this day and timeless, a power that can describe with clarity but also create images rich with ambiguity.