Publisher's Synopsis
"I thought I would feel more. What I wasn't expecting was this disconnect between the blankness of these nearly anonymous spaces and the depth of sorrow they were supposed to contain. It was with this in mind that, after selecting a dozen photographs, I developed them into 16' x 20' Type C color prints. As I organized the show and thought about what to include on each photograph's placard, it occurred to me that what I had been fighting against, what had created such unease in me, was the realization of how ahistorical it all felt. Here were these spaces that were supposed to be defined by the human events that had happened within them, yet they refused to act or look their part. Increasingly, these landscapes, as photographed, seemed indifferent toward the narratives that had marked them on the map. My unease came from my guilt that I was actively making photographs that encouraged the act of forgetting. Yet that guilt led to a compositional choice: maybe by refusing political geography and not naming these spaces on the placards, the photographs might begin to restore some other narrative: some story that was perhaps previous, or beside the historical one; one that wasn't totally recognizable but still signified."
