Rensselaer County Spring (NSFW)
We are destroying our world. Every year we encroach more on the environment than ever before, in the first half of 2022 we have devoured a record setting 1,500 square miles of Brazilian rainforest. Globalforestwatch.org provides the startling figure of 16% deforestation in the United States over the last 20 years. Even the land around me in rural New York Rensselaer County is being swallowed up by developers. With a 1 million square foot Amazon warehouse within two miles of my house, and a second, 53-acre Amazon site being developed right around the corner from the first one, even my little spot of land will likely be lost to housing development to support these jobs. Slowly what was once all agricultural land is being parceled off, and what was once home to nothing but wildlife is now a parking lot for FedEx trucks.
Yet nature will not be daunted. Even the land on which my home is built shows signs of habitation long ago abandoned and destroyed; rusty barbed wire and broken glass in the woods speak to the existence of a barn long before I even saw the land. However, deforestation doesn't matter to the plants themselves. They continue to sprout, grow, seed, and die at the proper time.
These gelatin silver prints were made beginning in early spring 2017 in my yard and the surrounding area, on the first day I noticed the tree buds forming, and continuing through when the flower blossoms opened. The original goal was to document the early days of spring, however they became something more when I decided to adapt them to account for human presence. I ran the film through the camera a second time, not knowing what was on which roll, and only knowing if the rolls were vertical or horizontal image orientation, and sometimes not even that. I shot the figure studies in 2018, and printed them alone in the darkroom in 2020, and the loneliness of the figure speaks to isolation during the pandemic. On some rolls the frame lines don’t match up, so the prints are the combination of five or six images printed together as they run together. The random pairings of figure studies and portraits in the studio "over" the latent images on the film add a different level to the original images, overlaying human presence with nature, distorting or destroying the original image, mirroring the real world. The resulting random double exposures speak to fertility, grace, rebirth, and the resilience of nature even with the imprint of humanity on them.
Read MoreYet nature will not be daunted. Even the land on which my home is built shows signs of habitation long ago abandoned and destroyed; rusty barbed wire and broken glass in the woods speak to the existence of a barn long before I even saw the land. However, deforestation doesn't matter to the plants themselves. They continue to sprout, grow, seed, and die at the proper time.
These gelatin silver prints were made beginning in early spring 2017 in my yard and the surrounding area, on the first day I noticed the tree buds forming, and continuing through when the flower blossoms opened. The original goal was to document the early days of spring, however they became something more when I decided to adapt them to account for human presence. I ran the film through the camera a second time, not knowing what was on which roll, and only knowing if the rolls were vertical or horizontal image orientation, and sometimes not even that. I shot the figure studies in 2018, and printed them alone in the darkroom in 2020, and the loneliness of the figure speaks to isolation during the pandemic. On some rolls the frame lines don’t match up, so the prints are the combination of five or six images printed together as they run together. The random pairings of figure studies and portraits in the studio "over" the latent images on the film add a different level to the original images, overlaying human presence with nature, distorting or destroying the original image, mirroring the real world. The resulting random double exposures speak to fertility, grace, rebirth, and the resilience of nature even with the imprint of humanity on them.
