Go To The Land And I Will Show You

We didn’t stop at Gettysburg on the drive to DC. We were moving from New York, where I grew up, to California. We drove in search of lands we had never seen before, not unlike the brutal settler colonialists who did the same before us. As we passed the highway exit toward the battlefield, I imagined 1863, the copse of trees, the high-water mark, and the cannon fire that would have made it impossible to see the sky from that field in Pennsylvania. After not stopping at Gettysburg, I would never not stop at another Gettysburg again. For eight years and twelve road trips I would stop at them all. It was an obsession, not with the United States but with invisibility, with deception, with illusion. Photographing heritage sites in the continental US, I searched for evidence of the myopics, orientations, and disorientations of the vestigial myth of American exceptionalism. What resulted was a psychogeography elucidating a subconscious of American history: an aesthetics and semiotics of a curated and carceral past and present.