I’ve been making photographs about American people, places, things and events for many years. While traveling in search of these black and white photographic essays I frequently made pictures along the way unrelated to the current topic I was working on at the time. I thought of these found images as kind of a sketchbook of curious, whimsical and ironic scenes of the American landscape.
In 2007, while looking back at contact sheets and rough prints of my earlier documentary work, I was reacquainted with these photographs I had made sporadically over time and realized many of these images are of places where the natural landscape and built environment intersect.
When I discovered as many as 30 pictures unified around this theme, I was inspired …. and in 2008 I began to create an extended body of work entitled The Nature/Culture Project. For this new work I decided to make color digital images and use the wider HD format. By adding a color pallet and expanding my frame to include a greater sense of space I feel I have been able to capture a more authentic view of what I am seeing in the contemporary American landscape.