Stage Sets

These pictures were taken over a period of ten years in parts of the Western United States — areas in Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Washington. The subjects were largely and intentionally sought locally, within a limited radius around where I happened to be residing: Pocatello (ID), Logan (UT), Reno (NV) and Tacoma (WA). I occasionally set out on longer road trips between locations, primarily on the edges of the Great Salt Lake (GSL) between UT and NV. The work is as much about fiction as it is documentary, and a duality of factual and imaginary has been central to it from its inception. In the early stages, before I moved West, that was tied up with underlying themes of science fiction. The lunar appearance of empty parking lots in deserted peripheries of Southern Michigan I drove out to (in a kind of downgraded space odyssey) brought to mind a converse of sorts to the astronaut's description: "the moon's color is that of your driveway." The sci-fi connotations later receded, particularly after I started working exclusively in large format. I became interested in a set-like quality that places take on at night; in a staged, somewhat artificial, perhaps even fake appearance that becomes evident in the photograph. In that sense, there is a "derealizing capacity" of photography manifest in this work.