Introduction
“Bolinas” delves into the small, unincorporated and largely off-the-grid community of the same name in Northern California, resting precariously on the coast of the Pacific. Dirt roads with hand-painted signs mark the pathways between a notoriously reclusive population with a rich cultural and agricultural history dating back to the 1920s, with a
flowering in the late 1960s after the Summer of Love. A collective effort to clean up after an oil spill brought the people of Bolinas together, and the desire to live an intrinsically shared existence with one another and closely to the land on their own terms is how they decided to stay. There are no longer any true communes in town but that same sharing mentality of perpetual exchange and engagement persists. My point of entry and access to the town was through a friend who started sharing a home with seven others in late 2008. Created during many extended stays in which I would
live in the house, I was struck by the intricacy and complexity of interconnectedness, the near seamless relationship
between humans and nature, the invisible web binding moments together. I was interested primarily in the dynamic between the young women in the house and in town and the spiritual, perhaps even near religious connection they
have with the landscape of this mystical place straddling two geographic plates, the past and the present, and two worlds.
“Josiah’s Farm” focuses on Josiah Early, a young man raised by a Mennonite minister in Virginia. About five years ago Josiah, his best friend Ezekiel and fellow childhood friends began cultivating the land and their own versions of masculinity on a large property in a rural town in the Catskills of New York. This place became their domain, as Josiah
and his friends were set free as they began reconciling themselves with manhood. I place myself there as a participating witness, responding to and not dictating moments enacted, though my presence is important and integral in the process and creation of the work itself, and as a Jewish woman from the northeast I remain in many ways an outsider. In order to gain access, I must assimilate into their constructed world as seamlessly as possible and embody their notions of what a woman should be and be that for them.
The camera itself plays a role, for them it serves as a validation of their choices, actions and lifestyle.
For me it is the means with which to visually investigate the myths manifested, the cross-section of reality and fantasy that converges in both these places. With the photographs I ask why people desire to go to the land and create an alternative path in life? What makes a place a home and how do we truly define what home even means? Is the life lived one they are running to or a site of safety and an escape from a life they are running from? In both series I delve into the fictions these young men and women create for themselves and explores that – which is the land more than anything else - which
physically and psychologically compels them to behave in these ways.