(Un)Seen Lands:
The Texture of Intimacy
2018
This is a love story. Through the heat of summer into the rains of fall, I observed my homeland of coastal Northern California transform into landscapes of lived experience – places of intimacy. I led with a question: why was my life-long relationship to place so important? What is gained, or lost, when people interact with their natural environments?
The canon of landscape photography often portrays the Earth as passive, to be seen and conquered. To photograph the landscape meant to make oneself separate from it. I believed there was another way of relating. This began with challenging the way I look at my subject, considering what it meant to more closely see what I was photographing. Bringing this perspective into the landscape, I began to witness a complex sensory relationship unfold within me, braided with memories, full of longing, grief and awe.
