“The black topped backroads crisscrossing America’s vast landscapes are an essential element in our literary and visual conception of who and what we are. Beyond transporting ourselves across these vast spaces, a sweep of road introduces a familiar and even humanizing element into the rugged and lonely landscapes.”
As a landscape photographer, the natural features of the Badlands easily attract the eye.. Its jagged peaks and the interplay of light, shadow, and texture offered endless photographic possibilities. Gradually, the road reveals its own visual potential. Its shining and smooth surfaces and gentle contours lead the eye through rough crags and rock formations, providing visual relief from the deeply textured natural features. The road introduces energy into the scene as it winds around corners and cuts across the canvas, dividing it into visually accessible parts. For a brief moment a human made object enhances and even beautifies its natural surroundings.
“The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”
― Teilhard de Chardin
The potential of a photograph and perhaps its unique characteristic is the ability to create the feeling of permanence in an ever-changing world. Making a photograph is a mode of contemplation. A photograph makes us feel that the never ending process of creation, the constant coming and goings of our individual lives, has for a moment stilled. The photographer searches the scene through one or more of many possible approaches and paths and finally finds rest somewhere in the space. In these photographs I’ve tried to present what I encounter and experience in the natural world: an isolated moment freeze-framed. I never fully understand why a moment is meaningful - I only know that it is.
Photographs are stilled and unique moments never to be seen again except through the recorded image. In this form, a photograph allows a person to stop and consider that the natural world and our relationship with it has significance. We view or visit a place many times, each time encountering something new–a conduit into creation and contemplation.