This Land is Our Land

For the past 3 years, my wife and son and I have been traveling around the country. The impetus for these works came from the photographs of Eleanor and Barbara around Chicago that Harry Callahan took. In those photographs Callahan is claiming ownership of the space around him. The photographs say "This is our neighborhood, this is our city." My family, being the nomads we are, have no neighborhood to claim. Our home is made across the United States. The spirit of the photographs as well as the title are meant to reference the Woody Guthrie song "This Land is Your Land." The shift from "Your" to "Our", though slight, belies the connection to a more troubling practice of a privileged class of people claiming ownership of the land through photography. The work lies at the intersection of a family's travelogue and an often troubled history of landscape photography.