Artist’s Statement

It is pretty much taken for granted that nearly all landscapes have been altered at some time in some manner by human intervention. It is the depth and breadth of this intervention that is so monumental. It literally stretches to the beginning of human history. The sheer willpower and man hours that have been necessary to wreak the changes we see in our world are staggering. The images shown here are a testament to that willpower, and a plea for caution, as our manipulation appears to accelerate with the use of ever more powerful tools.

We witness these changes to our world on a daily basis, and yet we don’t really reflect upon the magnitude of our collective exertion on the planet. The extent of the alterations makes them invisible to our everyday lives. It is finding these proclamations of our extraordinary power - in the ordinary world around us - that interests me.

While technique and technology are important elements in a nonverbal form of communication such as photography, it is ultimately the emotional, intuitive connection with the subject that I strive to transmit. With these images of nearly complete modification of the environment, more questions are asked than I can possibly answer.

The human form is not particularly evident in these landscapes, but their influence is certainly profound. It is a common misconception that the human enterprise with our environment is somehow unnatural. Meanwhile, we hold dearly to the concept of a “wilderness” that is untouched, inaccessible, but a source of renewal. William Cronon has said, “The point is not that our current problems are trivial, or that our devastating effects on the earth’s ecosystems should be accepted as inevitable or ‘natural.’ It is rather that we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving these problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we ourselves cannot inhabit.”