AMERICAN PALIMPSESTS | THIS WAS WHAT THERE WAS
In 2003 I set out to photograph the spate of new suburban housing developments throughout the continental United States. At that time the nation was expanding exponentially. With new homes being built in 60 days or less, communities were sprouting everywhere. I spent long days on the road, submersing myself in repetitively identical communities exploring the effects of suburban sprawl on the natural environment. Initially I was attracted to our strange desires to alter wilderness, meadows and even desert to build unnatural and lifeless environments to live in. After many days spent in such sites, I couldn’t differentiate one town from the other. I found myself nostalgic for spaces that were full of history and people, spaces that had already been defined by American culture. While I continued to photograph the new suburban developments, I began turning my camera onto a second subject: the places beyond the new town lines. I soon realized that what I was fascinated by was not only the effect of suburban sprawl on our natural landscape, but also how the effects of sprawl revealed itself in the rapidly declining older neighborhoods.
From Florida to Washington State, New York to New Mexico, I have photographed 28 states over a five-year period; the end result is a book project entitled American Palimpsests | This Was What There Was . Divided into two parts, American Palimpsests portrays the newly constructed man made habitats of early 21st Century suburbs, while This Was What There Was details the places I encountered on the roads in between these new housing developments; they are the remnants of a colorful past fading amid a national transformation. The common subject of both parts is the built environment; together they represent the liminal state between old and new, unique and indistinguishable, natural and artificial.
Since the start of this project our nation’s economic standing has changed dramatically. The beginning of this decade saw a housing boom; we left established neighborhoods behind to build fresh ones on new lands. Today we are facing the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Many of the new communities I photographed for this project now lie empty, with many developments left incomplete. Every day we hear more about the foreclosure crisis and homes being lost. What we don’t hear about is the irreversible destruction to the natural habitat, a direct result of these construction sites that now lie unfinished. If it is true that history cyclical, then we need to look into our past to restore our immediate future.