“…flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without knowing even the extent of that loss.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The keys to my first car were a means of escape. I was free to drive to the ends of the earth, to be alone in nature. This need to be isolated seemed a primal instinct. Since my late teens, I have been taking solitary road trips, seeking to lose myself along back roads, and finding comfort in the vastness of my natural surroundings. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods any time,” wrote Thoreau, “…and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, – for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.”
For the series Rooted, I made images using the wet collodion process, a nineteenth century process requiring the image to be exposed and developed on site. Inspired by the historical photographers of the American West, I took to the road with my 8×10 camera and a portable darkroom in search of familiarity in the unfamiliar landscape of rural America. Each photograph engages the viewer in a dialogue between the equal and opposite elements in nature. The title Rooted is, in itself, a paradox. My pilgrimage uproots me, but I find myself grounded in the familiar strangeness of nature.
funded in part by the Tierney Family Foundation