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the Land said
2024-2026 (preview)

What can nature teach us about the human experience?

All life emerges from our planet Earth. For all humans across cultures, borders, centuries and millennia, interconnection with the earth has always been an intrinsic part of existence. The Earth unites us all, and always will. 

Despite this deep interconnection, our globalized world allows for many people’s daily lives to become more and more distant from direct, physical connection with the earth. When we lose this direct connection, we can also lose the awareness of our interconnection with the planet and all living things. Symptoms such as apathy towards the environment, chronic anxiety and the erosion of empathy can arise from this loss of awareness. As we face climate change, widespread mental health issues and political polarization, the importance of this awareness cannot be underestimated. The intention of this work is to remind us of the timeless connection we all share with the earth and each other.

In 2024 I began photographing individuals across the Western U.S. and Mexico whose daily lives are rooted in the natural world. An indigenous weaver in Juneau, Alaska. A stone age tool instructor and survival guide in Utah. A goat farmer in Baja California Sur. A mezcal maker in Oaxaca. I photographed eight individuals, covering a range of ethnicities, backgrounds, practices, and environments. All have practices that ground them in the natural world, and all of them have learned from the earth herself. 

I witnessed their daily lives, their chosen craft, and the details of this connection. The real moments and scenes that make up a life: the bucket full of freshly-caught fish for dinner. The pinecone used as a hairbrush. Smoke emerging from the underground oven where the agave plants are roasted before being fermented and distilled. This work mixes environmental portraiture, reportage, and still life images, photographed on a Rolleiflex 3.5 medium format film camera.

To break down the perceived separation between photographer and subject, I also photographed traces of my own experience: a self-portrait as I bathed in the cool waters held by stone walls in the arid desert; my feet on the dashboard as I traveled the winding roads of the west. I photographed the places in between, a visual record of the continuous landscape that this continent shares.

This body of work resists the narrative that to connect with the earth has to look one way, or belongs to one type of person. It resists the narrative of separation – that we are separate from the earth, and that photographer is separate from subject. It instead builds a more nuanced story of woven experience between human and land, physical craft and spiritual practice, and documentarian and documented, all a reminder of our profound oneness with the earth.

As Humberto, a goat farmer in Baja California Sur, said, “the land doesn't makes mistakes.”