My recent work, “American Scrapbook”, depicts fragments of the American experience. Taken individually, each image tells the story of a very particular place. Viewed together, relationships between disparate places and structures emerge, highlighting a shared American sensibility as well as photography’s capacity for forging new meaning among otherwise isolated moments.
Rather than call out overt political or economic signifiers that epitomize the American condition today, these images seek out iconography from various interconnected systems that direct our collective national consciousness – commerce, infrastructure, natural resources, domestic space, religion, borders, racism, power, celebrity, tourism, and more. Within these systems that dictate values, behaviors, and aesthetic preferences, the indelible marks of past actions and diverse quests for the American Dream become potent symbols in our visual landscape.