I’ve been making pictures for a while at this point. More specifically I’d say I’ve been taking it seriously for about 10 years or so. In that time I’ve made thousands of photographs. What I have never done, however, is assemble those images in to a larger coherent, concrete project. For much of that time most of my output has been individual images posted on social media or maybe sporadically assembled in to loose categories on a website. In part this has maybe been a byproduct of my more singular (or, parochial) focus on landscape photography until very recently. It’s hard to put imagery into different projects on different themes when you're only working around one central theme.
But even working solely around one theme it has bothered me over the years that I have never translated this output in to something more concrete. I historically barely even print my work. And something that I have been leaning in to more in the last year or so of coming back to photography is making more concrete things and more coherent bodies of images, images that work with a theme or express something greater than any single image is capable of expressing—books, in other words. I want to create more books, larger scale projects in the ways that only photobooks seem (to me) capable of doing. Hat tip to John Gossage for this perspective, really.
The project “279 Acres” is my first stab at doing this. Over the years and the innumerable walks I have collected a body of imagery all shot in a small local park near my home in Kalispell, Montana. The park, as you may have gathered from the title, covers 279 acres of land and contains around 7 miles of trails that meander through the beautiful forested slopes and cliffs that jut up from the Flathead valley.
The project is maybe a riff on a quip from the venerable Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau makes the comment at one point that a circle of ten mile’s radius in the natural world contains enough variety for a lifetime of close observation. As he puts it, “There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”
A 20 mile diameter circle of untrammeled nature feels like a luxury to most of us. I am fortunate to live in Montana where I can still find such a circle if I wanted to. But because of that luxury of wild spaces I also wanted to push the limits of the premise, to narrow the focus and see what we might be able to do with 279 acres (or maybe even less in the future). In that sense the project is also about small spaces, about the little pockets of natural beauty that commonly exist right in the midst of our lives and about the Thoreauvian push to stop and look closely at the inexhaustible depth of things around us, even in the smallest pockets of it.
But it is also about something beyond that, about the eternal value that these places are capable of presenting to us if we are willing to spend time with them, to contemplate them, and the avenues of meaning which they may (hopefully) open up for us.
I am currently in the process of curating the imagery, settling on a solid collection of imagery (I’m shooting for around 50-75 photos for the book), and then working on sequencing before I send the finished product out for printing. I will keep people in the loop if anyone is interested in the final product.
