Crooked Meadow: The Czech Republic 2006

Crooked Meadow is a series of photographs made in a small town in the Czech Republic, a place built around a legendary castle at the crook of the Vltava River. Fascinated by the popular tendency to name, claim and monumentalize specific landscapes while casting aside others as insignificant, my work investigates overlooked, vestigial terrains on an intimate scale, locating the covertly momentous within the commonplace. Extinct architectures often come about as a result of happenstance or negligence--yet they have always beckoned to me as potent sites through which to decipher communal histories.

My continued interest in storytelling from within particular places rather than directly about them unfurls not through observing what is most prominent in places, but by way of hearsay, warning and whisper as I move within them. My artistic material derives from my belief that what is to be found, between the infamous and the forgotten, between intention and chance, is more mysterious, more significant, than any gesture I could propose, any individual I could imagine, or any place I could premeditate.

Part of what compels me to make photographs and photographic books is the medium’s implication that whatever is shown originates from what was singularly seen, and singularly located. By offering images that function—instead—as chameleons do, belonging not to fleeting visions but to simultaneous ones—not to fixed places but to resonate ones, I hope to question this assumption, and to cultivate poetic and atmospheric alliances between that which at first strikes as disparate.