Thinking About Photography

The resulting photograph, Eroding Shoreline: The Calm Before the Storm, is a poetic reduction of this complex terrain, a still in the unfolding saga of the lakefront.  Over the subsequent months I photographed this facsimile in different ways, first by capturing its contours and silhouettes, then by deconstructing the model itself. Toward the end of the project I was furiously pulling apart modeled landmasses, balconies, and canopies and arranging them on a large lightbox to photograph.  I arranged these elements to mimic the actual terrain, but also to convey the impermanence of the hillside.

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Tearing apart the paper shoreline became a metaphor for the hillside’s physical destruction as well as my inability to halt everything that seemed to be collapsing around me.  The photographs and the process are a nod to the ferocious power of nature.  The deconstructed landscapes shift into strange maps articulating natural forces and tracing the contours of fragile terrain and man-made structures alike.  The photographs become unmoored as the viewpoint flips from frontal to aerial perspective and landmasses float free from the water, whose forces they indirectly reference in their disintegration.