The genre of landscape, particularly landscape photography, thrives on exclusion. The messy context of places, and the unsightly blemishes of human life, are excluded from the frame, leaving a perfected vision of Nature with a capital N. Although some level of exclusion of context is essential to photography (for how else could you frame but to block out), landscape’s smarts all the more as the genre has been largely dominated by men. Since the 1940s, a fantasy of landscape photography as captured by a rugged man who ventures forth alone and sees what no one else could see, has persisted, almost untouched. 

I’ve not been immune to the draw of a perfected landscape photograph in my career as a photographer. I started creating this series of collages with my old photographs, as an exploration of landscapes in context. An attempt to be in conversation with landscape, rather than capture it.

Landscape No. 7 (features a fishing line and teal water) was displayed as part of Photographic Center Northwest’s Juried Exhibition “Being Present,” in summer 2024.