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I regularly find myself clicking through old hard drives, some of which are almost twenty years old. One in particular is in multiple pieces as I’ve unsuccessfully tried to revive it like Frankenstein’s Monster. Going through this digital scrap book brings on many emotions, reminding me of trips with friends, homework assignments, freelance jobs, cringy music I liked, even cringier ex-boyfriends and art that I thought would change the world. Recently, I came across a written response assignment from an advanced photography class I took at Pratt about Stephen Shore’s 2007 traveling exhibition “Biographical Landscape,” at The International Center for Photography. At my ripe age of nineteen or twenty, I had already self-identified as a studio photographer who worked with large and medium format film cameras, creating dreamlike constructed tableaus of shipwrecks and burning houses. My response to Shore’s show actually made me laugh out loud. I absolutely hated it.
Given the emphasis on staged photography at the time, the idea of photographing the every day and exhibiting prints alongside diner receipts, branded matchbooks and cocktail napkins elicited an exaggerated eye roll from my twenty year old self. The reason I laughed out loud, though, was because now when I present about my work I actually include images from Stephen Shore in my presentations. (I like to show his 1972 photograph from Oklahoma City; A soft, somewhat unremarkable, stop-light street intersection with a cropped illuminated Texaco sign and pile of trash in the left foreground. The beauty in the image comes from the orange sherbert color cast from the sunset.) Fantasy, tragedy and construction dominated my undergraduate work, making it difficult for me to see a more subtle absurdity in the mundane.
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Over the past ten years or so, I have found myself drawn to photographing spaces that simulate / emulate something else, dryly showing how ridiculous people are (myself included.) I drive across the country searching for something I think I’ve lost, despite never knowing it. What motivates people to make things and spaces that represent a distant reality, perhaps never experienced? (Peeling wallpaper of a rainforest at a diner in the middle of arid agrarian Kansas; A plastic palm tree that rains water into an overly chlorinated hotel pool in Arkansas; A pixelated Dutch landscape poster behind an old window frame in Michigan; Graceland; and taxidermy, everywhere, good and bad.) While I’m searching for something, seemingly in the wrong places, I recognize that others are looking for this too. Are we searching for a memory or for a fantasy? How can we be there and here at the same time? How can something be at once totally ordinary and also fantastic? (Now re-read those questions in Herzog’s accent for full effect.)
But maybe these contradictions are the point. As I, in the spirit of Shore and many other photographers before me1, escape across the country looking for photographs, I think about what it means to be American. What is American Culture? Some gumbo of other cultures, oppression, capitalism, individualism, and many other things that make it completely impossible to define. Even the term ‘American’ is problematic. And yet, here I am, trying to figure out what I am a part of. It makes sense that what I photograph is already a translation of something else, simultaneously banal and too much. Of course, I’m interested in Brad from Michigan who makes full scale dioramas with plastic skeletons doing everyday tasks behind his junk shop. Or visiting multiple alien themed ‘museums’ in Roswell, New Mexico with repurposed Halloween animatronics, smoke machines and glow in the dark everything. Or how the Grand Canyon is dissected by a patchwork of chainlink fence that attempts to mirror the shape of million year old rocks.
1Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange, Lee Friedlander, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth, Ryan McGinley. While this list is in no way comprehensive, we can notice the lack of diversity in race and gender.
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I’ve been on a few road trips, typically with a specific destination where any other stops were an addendum of convenience. My journey with Ava in May 2025 allowed us to wander across the southern portion of the country, looking, escaping, driving. In Joshua Tree we stayed in an AirBnB with a hot tub, which was slightly ridiculous given that it was already a million degrees there. One night we were cooking ourselves in this hot tub after photographing all day, when for one or two minutes we saw a dotted straight line of lights stream across the sky in succession - maybe 20 or 30 of them. We had been remarking on how the landscape of the Southwest feels other-worldly and questioning whether everyone is slightly hallucinatory because of the dry heat. Watching the distant stream of lights, Ava panicked at her seemingly imminent abduction, while I laughed and opened my arms to be beamed up. And, in some way, that's what made this trip work. Our responses were idiosyncratic, but were both tied to our belief (at that moment) in extra terrestrials. Of course, it was actually a string of satellites which can be seen somewhat regularly at dusk, but that is much less entertaining.
Ava and I almost decided to skip the Grand Canyon. Too hyped, toursty, not strange enough. We did stop, though, and in case you haven’t been, it is definitely not too hyped. Not to mention, dramatic shifts in altitude and the effects of less oxygen to the brain turned the most trivial of things into a laughing fit. A raven eating a watermelon rind - Absolutely hysterical at 6800 feet. We walked along the southern rim identifying all the languages we could; I was poorly attempting to (internally) practice my German and French (it wasn’t going well). Like almost everyone who goes to the West, we were struck with the vastness of everything. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon it is almost impossible to fully understand your scale in relation to the land and geologic time. How many micro eco-systems exist(ed) within this one viewpoint overlooking miles of ravine, rock, river, vegetation? Individual plants and stones melded together to become lines and organic blobs of color and texture in a larger composition. The camera conveniently mediated, flattened and contained this incomprehensible crater in the earth.
If you’re looking to buy a new cell phone, I suggest walking around a National Park for a few hours - every option is there. Yes, there are the traditionalists taking pictures with ‘real cameras,’ (one younger guy told me my Mamiya was “The Legend” in Sedona, and considering Ava and I were the only women with ‘real cameras’ my ego was definitely inflated.) But, considering the computer/ camera most of us carry around in our pocket, it is no surprise that a common scene includes someone holding a phone out to take a picture (usually above their head, like they need that top down angle for the landscape selfie.) These spaces that seem infinite are shrunk into a 3” x 6” flat glass object a foot or two away from someone’s face. How strange it is to touch terrain with our fingers, controlling the zoom, focus or exposure, simultaneously receiving texts, social media updates and news alerts. This object helps contain and connect because feeling eyes or feet connect isn’t enough, or is it overwhelming? But, when I take each shot I’m not only thinking about what is in front of me, I’m also trying to reconcile with failure and success, homesickness, remorse, and a dozen other things; My sixteen year old self could have never imagined this, but would she be impressed? She was mostly looking at her phone, too.
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Once as an assignment for a photo class, I used the quote “To chart a course, one must have a direction,” by Berenice Abbott as a starting point. The focus of her essay “Photography at the Crossroads,” (1951) is not centered around this quote (and in fact, I don’t always agree with her focus on documenting the real, despite also being very annoyed with the pervasiveness of painting, but that is a topic for another day.) Although I pulled this quote for students, I find myself thinking about it often in relation to my practice; The push and pull between the freedom of photographing anything and my desire to know/ control everything (anything and everything are both impossibilities.) Her quote creates a middle path between aimlessness and an inflexible route; A direction, not the directions.
When Ava invited me to come with her on her cross country road trip I immediately started mapping out the stops, calculating the amount of time we might need in each location, evaluating what places were critical and what could be visited another time. (Sorry, Marfa, didn’t work out this time.) She often reminded me that I could let some of my “Type A” relax a little and just go with the flow.. Seriously? Does she know me? (She does, in fact.)
Prior to the trip people would ask, “What are you going to photograph?” While a valid question, the response was underwhelming in a literal sense.. Landscapes, interiors, things on the ground, wallpaper and painted ceilings, reflections in windows, probably a lot of small animals, Ava doing things, anything with good light, everything I can at f1.2; Basically, the same stuff I photograph wherever I am. What was driving me to make images was what I was feeling. The things that I can’t articulate in words, because I’m not a writer or orator. But when people ask you about your upcoming trip while at the beer garden, it can be hard to connect photographing armadillos and shadows on the ground to memory and escapism.
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A critique with a student I had just met: Her work was a grouping of square raw canvas paintings in a grid of six- two rows, three columns. The imagery was watered down washed out purples, denim blues, some faded greens gesturally depicting or more accurately referencing window panes in image subject and physicality. It was unclear if objects (flowers, lamps, a desk) were reflections or existed in front or behind the window as they floated in and out of both spaces. She was quiet and nervous. (I also run quiet and nervous, but since I was giving the critique I had to put on my teacher's voice and deal.) We were being watched by a group of about twenty faculty and students, so she read her project statement as an introduction. It was good, but generic - It had clearly been worked and reworked in a way that made it lose some personality. I asked a bunch of questions trying to get to her real motivation, when she finally softened and said that it was about her dissociating. If we hadn’t been performing for an audience, this conversation would have taken a turn, but given her (our) nerves and the eyes on us, I moved to practical advice for new work. (After I quietly said to her that I had many more questions about this.)The funny thing is that I have been photographing Friedlander-esque distortions in mirrors and window reflections for a very long time.
I often think about the impossibility of realizing the internal and external from one vantage point in one frame and the chaos that comes from that attempt. How trying to exist in the threshold between interior and exterior, before and after (now?), creates a reality that is simultaneously fantasy and live action. How comforting it can be to retreat into the internal and shut the window to the world. At the time of the critique, I had been flying more than usual for shows and other academic pursuits and I was observing how clean everything looks from 30,000 feet in the air, how I was disconnected from the earth for periods of time and the feeling when my body ‘touched grass’ in a new landscape half way across the country. Was I ever really connected though? Was I using my camera like a USB cable to help me plug in? How could these small plane windows protect me from the harsh ozone flying by at 500 mph outside?