Single Image Category - Portrait Awards 2014

My photos are explorations of the landscape of the Arkansas Ozarks, especially the traces of early settlements around the Buffalo National River. What has been absent from those abandoned mountain sites for a long time is the human presence. In the photos, the rugged, almost hostile textures of the Ozark mountains—leaves, grasses, rocks, lichen, bones, and bark—find their equivalent in the textures of the male body. By placing an older male model in front of an old chimney, on a craggy boulder, or on a bed of dead sycamore leaves, I am inviting the viewer to ponder the effects of time on nature and on the human body. The photographer is not a detached witness documenting this process; instead, the model’s direct gaze shows the photographer’s stake in the relationship between human and nature.