Temporary Order
The land is never finished. Even in stillness, there’s motion—an empty lot quickly colonized by garlic mustard, a rusted fencepost swallowed by blackberry brambles. I’m drawn to these places in flux precisely because they expose our flawed categorizations: wasteland versus wilderness, productive versus fallow. What we might dismiss as degraded often reveals nature’s stubborn ability to reinvent. This is where my own photographing begins—not with pristine vistas, but with landscapes that confess their layered histories even as they’re being rewritten. My images are attempts to distill what I find essential in these spaces, the determined life, the marks that have been left, and the quiet exchange between the two.
By examining the varied evidence of human interaction with the land, I hope to reveal the cultural and economic values we impose upon it. There is little use in assigning fixed worth to the places I photograph—declaring one essential and another as irredeemable. These landscapes are ones of contradictions and layered histories. When I stand in these half-wild places with my camera, I feel the urge to order a discordant scene into something legible, to impose a narrative onto a landscape that is refusing to stay still. I frame a thicket growing on a gravel berm, and for a moment, the composition feels like control. But then the wind shifts, a branch snaps, and the illusion falls apart. My photographs are not answers—only evidence of a slow negotiation between the land and myself, between what persists and what has been imposed.
