current projects.

How do you show what you cannot see, what isn’t physically there, but what is nevertheless your subject? You can name it, to be sure, and thus direct your viewer to its meaning, but you cannot show it. Naming, Race, and the Landscape, is a collaborative exploration of how, through the process of naming, race and ethnicity are inscribed upon the American landscape. The fact that racial and ethnic identities cannot be physically embodied in the landscape and thus cannot be pictured in a photograph of that landscape compelled writer Carla Williams and me to explore the complexities of attaching race or ethnicity to such a subject. Traveling together yet working independently, we visit selected sites across the U.S., mapping a broad range of locations and ethnicities in the selection of sites whose naming presents some context for understanding our racial and ethnic history.

Though not immediately recognizable to the viewer, each photograph in the series is the site of a highly personal childhood ritual or event. The absence of clear signifiers and the lack of specific (hi)story, however, allows the images to function as more universally accessible sites of collective experience: a ball field, a graffitied hilltop monument, a neighbor’s driveway. In this way the work functions as a way of thinking about public sites as personal landscapes.