Your Land

This land is Your Land. This land is the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument - 1.8 million acres held within the public domain in southern Utah. These photographs are a momentary account of this land, impressions of landscape, space, and time that visualize the presence of light and perspective parallel to experienced reality. They are pinhole photographs that capture a 360 degree view - a distorted panorama of overlapping impressions in which vantage point is eliminated and yet emphasized. This land is the epicenter in a battle of boundaries and mineral rights disguised as a states’ rights issue. It is a clash of perspectives in which conservation competes with economics, that the value of wilderness is not equal to the promise of jobs, and pits the future of public lands against the fate of a dying coal industry. However, this land knows nothing of boundaries. It knows only of infinite time. This land is remarkable. It reveals a layered history - geologic, paleontological, and cultural - exposing an unfathomable expanse of time. This series of pinhole photographs aims to record a more immediate experience. Designed specifically for this landscape, the camera is placed directly on the ground, exposing the richness of desert life found mainly at a scale below the knee. Unexpectedly, it captures an astounding range of view from immediate foreground to the far off distance. Scale is amplified. Perspective is shifted. The results are simple atmospheric gradations of light that become place and no-place at the same time. Yet these photographic impressions are deeply rooted to their place, recording a brief moment in time of an eternally shifting landscape.