Levee
VOID, 2023
Purchase Levee from VOID — Idea Books — Baltimore Photospace — Photo-Eye Bookstore — Photobookstore — Setana Books (signed copies available) — Bildband Berlin — Tipi Bookshop.
Book photos by VOID. Video by Tipi Bookshop.
Amongst the unstoppable changing world, the chaos, the growth, the loss, the laughter, and tears there came to a point where I couldn't breathe. I felt as though I was drowning. I went out to the levee on the Mississippi River by my mother's house and walked with my camera. That was when I began to see the world around me in a different way. I have looked through a camera most of my life but now I could see a quietness, a slowness to the point of being frozen in time. The end and beginning of all things became the same. I felt sanctuary in that feeling. I didn't want to lose this new stasis-like place. So I practiced staying there by photographing what it showed me. Making pictures in this place was not outside of the pain of losing my mother or the joy and wild ride of being one, rather it was beyond it. It is a quiet place to rest and feel the heart-sinking loss and what is found along the way.
Impeded Stream
Self-published, 2023
Limited edition of twelve with five cover options. Sold out.
I find that my eye is continuously drawn towards the land on the margins of the natural world and civilization. Agriculture is where the intersection of human existence and the shifting rural landscapes meet. I seek the wisdom of my grandparents who relied entirely on the work of the land against the unknowable weather to inform their own existence.
As I stand looking upon the tilled earth from the road or a ditch, I become aware of the distinction between the broken earth and myself. I am completely reliant on what it provides. I photograph with that knowledge, appreciating the curves and forms of the land that reluctantly exist after hundreds of agricultural years. Branches from nearby trees reach for the snow covered fields. A crop cover is reminiscent of a stream through the land. Native grasses such as big bluestem and sedge varieties grow around and through plastic barriers. Cut grasses form a mound at the edge of the woods, out of the way.
My grandparents worked their land in the past and I now follow in their footsteps. With my camera, I look for the land in its past, present, and future. Impeded stream approaches the edge of where our known civilization and the agricultural world intersect.
Township
TIS Books, 2017. Co-authored with Raymond Meeks, Tim Carpenter, and Brad Zellar.
In 2016, I photographed the auction of my family’s farm in Ohio with my then-partner, Raymond Meeks. This work was an exploration of the grief of my family and a working farm that had been in my family for over 150 years. As a way to process the photographs of the day of the auction, I collaborated with three other artists. This process allowed distance between myself and the emotional attachment to the work by relating, critiquing, and working with others. I learned how to visually process and distinguish the attachment of what was lost from the pictures themselves. The book, Township (TIS books 2018) resulted from this collaboration. This experience led me to make other photographic series of work surrounding loss. The farm auction sparked my curiosity to explore the land to more deeply explore the meaning of stewardship of this family land. This question of heritage and family are personal. However, allowed me to open to universal questions of how farming is viewed and cultivated as a commodity, separate from life itself.
