These images are part of a collaborative project with architectural historian, Zachary Violette, documenting the subversion of the picturesque ideal in the contemporary suburb: the way in which people's attempt at making a certain kind of landscape for themselves, has ended up destroying the environment they wanted to create. Americans' fetish for the private automobile, and their insistence on highly-organized sites of mass consumption and technology-saturated, mass-produced homes, has left the country with precious little of the pastoral landscape that the whole suburban experience was about in the first place.
The process of actually making the pictures for this project was surreal: driving around aimlessly, ending up in subdivisions and strip malls; there was often an eerie quietness to these places. I was left with the feeling that people were peering through their blinds observing me as if I was a spectacle.
The pictures are influenced by the Hudson River School, an artistic movement that also grew up in response to the loss of the pastoral landscape. Many of them contain elements drawn from those paintings including bodies of water, livestock, clouds, framing trees and the inevitable presence of man. I want to make pictures that are both beautiful and powerful; photographing an 'ugly' place in a 'beautiful' way is the central challenge of this project.
The Emerald Necklace is a diverse chain of parks in Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts that stretches from the Boston Common to the Forest Hills Cemetery. Landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, was a key player in the development of the Emerald Necklace. He was responsible for expanding the Boston's parks from the Boston Common, Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue Mall, to the cemetery through the existing Muddy River. The Emerald Necklace was also the first comprehensive regional park system in the country.
The appearance of the parks changes dramatically as you travel from one end to the other. Some parks are covered in lush, exotic plants like at the Arnold Arboretum while others are overgrown and unkept like on the Jamaicaway. There are places in the parks where the links connecting them become less apparent as roads and buildings harshly cut through. There is, however, one element that connects them all; the wonderful emerald color from which the Emerald Necklace gets it's name.
These photographs attempt to act as representation of the park's great diversity. By working in the late summer months, I was able to photograph each park the way they're meant to be seen. This was a wonderful landscape study for me and I hope it can draw more interest to the parks as a whole.
There is a small neighborhood in Brookline, Massachusetts filled with luxurious homes and pristine landscaping. These homes bear lush greenery and rich architectural detail. As I walked through the space, I realized, after being so taken by their beauty, that nearly every home had some sort of barrier keeping me from getting any further than the sidewalk. After taking a moment to stop and try to appreciate the homes, the barrier stopped me from getting any further.
I have always had an interest in how people with wealth lived. I was first interested in gaining insight on their lives but after spending a more time in their neighborhood I realized that they do not want me to know much about them. I embraced my exclusion and began photographing the barriers. While these photographs depict the barriers in the neighborhood, they still allow the viewer to have a voyeuristic curiosity with the space.