Riding the Amtrak train from New York to Seattle, I was unexpectedly smitten by the intimate views of the modest towns, rough and secluded settlements smattered on the land, empty roads, working farms and ranches, slow moving waters, wide open fields and neglected urban backsides. I wanted to inhabit these honest and unpretentious working landscapes and towns but all I could do was let them they slip by. It was an unexpected intense longing. Like the first nights with a new lover, I could barely sleep - waking in the middle of the night to be reassured that it was all still there outside my window, grateful for the slow transit across the continent.
During these troubling times when I have felt such disappointment in my country, these places, landscapes and photographs remind me that I can still feel a deep love for it too.
Dedicated to Vic, my once other love affair, who was by my side for this adventure and many others she and I dreamed up.
Every spring, I visit my father in the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona at the intersection of Arizona, California and Mexico - the most southwest corner of the southwest; a Bermuda Triangle where anything of interest and beauty seems to have vanished. Once a desert landscape, it’s been traumatized by RV lots, manufactured home subdivisions, corporate agriculture, military installations, indigenous and immigrant poverty, climate impacts and abandonment. The minimalist native landscape written off as ugly or “dead,” bulldozed into service or gussied up with imported tropical palm trees. Can there be justice for this desert landscape?
There’s beauty and mystery in the botanical world in all its forms and stages. I find solace and delight in the details and in the complex interrelationships of both wild and cultivated botanical ecosystems. Relationships that are decadent, lush, mysterious, even in decay. Startlingly beautiful and reassuringly predictable in their cycles. Sensual and scientific at once.
There’s beauty and mystery in the botanical world in all its forms and stages. I find solace and delight in the details and in the complex interrelationships of both wild and cultivated botanical ecosystems. Relationships that are decadent, lush, mysterious, even in decay. Startlingly beautiful and reassuringly predictable in their cycles. Sensual and scientific at once.
