The Takeaway

If I was going to spend a year listening, I also needed to keep myself accountable. So I developed this website, with the ideas of posting my daily edited reflections at least once a week (more on that in a moment).

Each weekly page has space for video, photos, and a brief piece of text. I was intentionally stepping out of my comfort zone as a journalist to give the land space to talk. My observations are less journalistic reportage and more a type of participant observation. Field notes ended up being short almost poetic sketches that got at what I was seeing and feeling in a given week.

It was a tad artsy fartsy and definitely not the traditional five-ws-and-an-h journalistic narrative.

My conversation started at the autumn equinox.

The first week was obvious. The time of the equinox coincided with sunrise at my location. Each day I went out at the same time with different camera to shoot the nuanced changes from day to day. The question was how would things appear different depending upon the technology.

And I quickly ran into my first glitch.

Remember that “post a new webpage with a week’s worth of videos” idea? Week one had a date that went missing for nearly a year (more on that in the next screen).

So much for best intentions.

It would be too easy to call it a problem. I wanted to shoot with both cutting edge as well as what I considered dead technology. In this case part of the toolkit included mini-dv cameras and a point and shoot device that recorded videos in a 4×3 aspect ratio that was slightly fuzzy. None of that should matter, I thought. The land’s narrative would be unaffected by the shooting source – aside from differences in tone or screen size that I felt would tell me about how the natural world interacted with the technological. What I didn’t count on was the difficulty I would face in converting the dead tech into something that could be edited in 2025. 

Leo Marx discusses the pastoral tradition when talking about the landscape in the United States. It started with writers, such as Henry David Thoreau, and gets incorporated by painters who idealize the American landscape as a type of unspoiled Garden of Eden. The machine – in Thoreau’s case the steam engine – intrudes into the space, rendering it “spoiled.”

Photographers like Ansel Adams tweak the machine in the garden concept. Here, the landscape is represented as unspoiled and natural, but the images hide the machine necessary for their own construction.

It could be argued that this project, which largely hides the hand of the creator while using digital filmmaking tools to capture the oral history of the land, is doing something similar. But it’s complicated by the dead technology, which doesn’t spoil the garden as much as the illusion of the invisibility of the machine. The editing challenge became a part of the oral history. 

As a result, the project directly engages in the tension between the machine and the garden. This is unlike Thoreau, who framed his time at Walden Pond as an escape from the machine, or Adams who with Nancy Newhall needed the “tongues of angels” to fully describe images of the wildnerness (84). The attempt here is to understand the conversation nature and technology are having with each other, as mediated by a creator.

The end result is the land forces me to consciously and intentionally accept the unpredictable. Even when the unpredictable is due to the actions of humans on the land.

In the 1970s, a group of photographers were part of a show at the George Eastman House in Rochester. The New Topographics was groundbreaking. The 10 photographers, all but one male (Hilla Becher collaborated with her husband Bernd), intentionally attempted to deconstruct the human/nature divide found in photographs by people like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. Instead, they looked at human interventions on the land, insisting that “nature and humanity were interwoven” (Foster-Rice and Rohrbackh 2010, xvii).

This theme recurs in my own work.

Consider a road trip in late fall of 2024, shortly after beginning the project. I’m a passenger. My friend Mel and I are heading to Salton Sea via Calexico. We take a detour to a restaurant/hotel/spa she read about on Atlas Obscura or something. We come over a ridge and it’s there. The border wall.

It rises over the road, casting a literal and figurative shadow. It’s bound in politics, of course, but the metal frame also interrupts the landscape.

As in The New Topographics, the wall makes “amply clear the contradiction between the myths of the American landscape – it’s expansive ’emptiness’ and its potential for renewal – and its present condition” (Foster-Rice and Rohrbackh 2010, xxv). Here in the far southwest, I see the land echo Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbackh’s contention that the value of contemporary landscape imagery “lies not with any simple elucidation of an exhausted landscape but with recognition of the fact of coexistence” of human and nature (xxv).

This project is 50 years removed from the New Topographics exhibition. But the land forces me to incorporate history as I help to tell its story. 

In a year of images one thing recurs: those incredibly gorgeous sunsets. They feel too easy, too expected. Yet I still turn my lens over the mesa to watch the sky paint extravagant colors.

It’s not just sunsets that catch my eye. The sky beckons. Clouds share stories that shift with the seasons. The heavy low ones that almost touch the ground during monsoons. Others streak or look like puffs of white. Their scientific names don’t matter in this narrative. The instead are telling me what to expect in a day. 

As I’m writing this I’m 30,000 feet in the air crossing the continent east to west. Tracking my flight are two jets, contrails streaming white behind. Another type of cloud – contrails. A third jet zips past heading east, seemingly going at an impossible speed.

Seeing the landscape from above changes things.

I don’t mean observing the patterns that appear due to human attempts to constrain or control the land. Of course they’re there. Human interventions are almost entirely geometric. Circles. Rectangles. Lines etched into the terrain forming an xy axis.

I look down and a highway snakes along a river in the desert. Patches of green form a perfect grid to the south, hugging where irrigation provides sustenance. If I’m in the right place (or maybe squint hard enough), I can even see that border wall.

On the days I’m 30,000 feet up it would be easy to take a day off and say, ‘Oh, nothing to see or hear.” After all, I’m not on the land’s level. Distanced. Looking down. But the land doesn’t necessarily think that way. Instead it shows me patterns that I follow. Clouds and technicolor skies. Contrasts of light and dark. The insanely bright blue wash that switches to enveloping puffs of white a few hundred miles later.

I think back to another trip a few years earlier. The plane was above the cloud line. Late summer. Storms. I swear I saw lightening going from the clouds up to the open sky above.

Maybe I was tired and hallucinating. Maybe lightening wasn’t shooting upwards into the sky.

Or, maybe the land is pointing me toward something other than only focusing on the human/nature intersection. Instead, it’s also leading me to its unpredictable colors, folds, and projections.