From Here On

As a child my family would take long trips each summer to visit relatives, either in Texas for my Father’s side or the Mid-west for my Mom’s. I’d sit in that back seat staring out the window as we rolled down the two lane, watching out the window as the world unfolded before my eyes, always curious for what was around the next bend. The America that a cross-country traveler encounters today is as changed as that young boy in that back seat. Having worked in the documentary tradition for most of my career I began this project with the intention of telling a story about America’s heartland. Over time I came to realize the story I was telling was as much my own as it was the heartland’s. As the country underwent the transition from the boom of the late nineties to the post 9-11 years, and the economic collapse to follow, I too was going through my own personal period of transition and personal loss. The photographs that resulted reflect a search for my own soul as well a search for the soul of the heartland. The earliest pictures in this body of work were made near my hometown in Arkansas. Over the course of several years I began visiting places throughout the country that have deeply personal connections for me; my mother’s birthplace in Ohio, the lake cabin I spent summers in my youth. Some locations were chosen for their iconic American names such as Dodge City and Paris Texas. Others were discovered randomly, in the course of travel. I've always believed in the power of photography as a rich and robust language, in the poetry of images. I began to think of this work as a visual folk song, a folk lament. I borrowed the title from a Woody Guthrie song that seemed to fit. From Here On. All the pictures were made on medium format film which I later scanned and made archival pigment prints, 15” x 15” in an edition of ten.