Abstract of the accomplished photographic work
My photographs of the built environment are inspired by the numerous failed searches for the purported Northwest Passage. For several centuries explorers assumed that the elusive passage was somewhere just out of sight. It never was. Nonetheless, speculative maps seemingly invented the undiscovered water route, blinded explorers from true discovery, and laced their journeys with a lurking foregone futility. I see this attitude of self-aggrandizing certainty throughout the landscape in structures that have fallen into disrepair and been haphazardly preserved. They are like monuments to plans gone awry; demonstrating the ineffectiveness of continuous earth-shaping efforts. The ever-changing built environment offers this proof: the world is malleable—but not controllable—as it constantly responds to our subjective desires and collective will. The way forward is not prescribed by wayfinding, instead it is through an open process of exploring and persistence. Onward.
Description of the project you intend to pursue through the Prize
My existing photographs have a corollary project that examines the part of the North American landscape that blocked the discovery of the Northwest Passage. So far my work has been focused on the built environment in areas that explorers searched for the passage. Since they imagined a cross-continental water route that did not exist, there is a large swath of land that prevented “discovery”. I want to photograph this land to visualize what their imagination so conveniently excluded. I hope to convey a more elusive sense of the landscape in this new work. I am interested in subjective vision and how the landscape appears to beckon without providing a way forward. The notion of exploration and discovery are human-made, and so is the idea that the landscape is designed for any specific passage. I will use a 4×5 field camera and color film, to photograph and then sequence the book.