Where Turkeys Go To Die

Where Turkeys Go to Die Out west from me off a country road is a small turkey farm with a silo and a large pen in the front. There are a few houses scattered about the land surrounding the farm. In autumn you can watch hundreds of white turkeys grow from babies to adults. I watched them every week on my commute to school. One day the turkeys disappeared. I often thought about the day they got to disappearing. I think about the sounds the nearby houses hear. I think about the blood spilled, and the haunting silence the next day – a singular sound (or non-sound) from what was polyphony. These thoughts inspired me to make images about history and experience – experiences dark and beautiful, uplifting and afflicted. I traveled (often trespassed) to forgotten spaces with my 4x5 camera or Polaroid camera to photograph. Many times I teetered, quite literally, between a busy road and a quiet solace. I also made images of objects steeped in the same darkness and beauty as the landscape images. Most of these images were made with my 4x5 large format camera. That camera is a huge pain in my ass. Sometimes it takes over an hour to make a single image. I process the negatives in a tray by hand, and my marks are visible on the negative and in the image.