Dejaview
Why are we so conflicted about nature? On the one hand, we profess to love beautiful spaces yet we often neglect those very areas.
This series—shot in an office park with eight large commercial buildings set back from a tall grass and tree-filled area about fifty yards from a commuter rail– is a good example of this contradiction. In late summer, I noticed only the manicured bushes and geometric angles of the buildings. But with the fall rain and vanishing leaves, behind the neat frontage of brick structures and bushes, I saw a pool-filled wetland sandwiched between carelessly abutting parking lots, an access road, and the railroad. This space, casualties of the development, contained generators, oversized trash containers with strewn trash, and severed trees and foliage.
When I began this project, I shot in rich color, which seemed to romanticize the buildings and space. Black and white neutralized the setting and I felt that the square format focused the viewer. Early morning and late afternoon light highlighted the blight. Fog or cloudiness seemed to flatten the landscape, making it feel more personal and allowing the viewer to enter into the story. The photographs contain open spaces with some dramatic details in a rich tonal range partially obscuring the buildings in a distance. Some include elements in the foreground—a road, telephone pole, broken trees, dumpsters, dirty snow pushed into the wetland pools–that echo the cold, human-made structures in the background. In others there is an interplay of tone and shape or visual compressing–the mass of the buildings, the oversized generators only partially hidden by trimmed bushes , or a corner of a large building extending way beyond the frame.