What's Next For Earth

I use this 19th-century process both with the view camera and the paper as a means of slowing down the act of perception, which leads to making the photograph. The impulse to make an image comes from a process of slow looking, attending to internal experience, which is seeking an outward expression. This happens both formally, in how I am composing and choosing the places I am going, but also as a way of pushing back against the speed of digital technology, fraught as it is given the entangled webs of extraction technologies and companies whose successes are based in privately held profits often at the expense of the communities across their supply chains and other loci of work.

My choice to use these materials rather than digital media reflects a desire to mindfully use with care the physical materials required. It also represents a closer relationship to the natural world, which is its source, trees, water, etc. I also am thinking about the way that method I use for making images is tied directly to notions of slowness. The ISO of the paper is about 3, meaning my exposures often take minutes, lending a temporal quality to the work, which creates a very different kind of image than a smart and fast digital camera would never be able to produce.

We see the passage of time in a very special way. The parts of the landscape which are more fixed, the heavier parts of the tree, are in sharp focus throughout the picture plane, while the water and the reflections give a dreamy quality to the image. This invites the viewer to consider the landscape and their relationship with it, to live in reciprocity rather than greed, not as a colonist just moving through but as an indigenous being entwined with all others now & in the future.

From the Think Resilience course, Social Justice / Equity / Ownership: “A truly resilient community must foster equity and democracy, as well as ecological renewal."

I used the collodion in this image both for its formal qualities, the smooth, grainless image, but also for its challenge to make a good glass plate and the alchemy of the process required, which feels so alchemical which references by feeling that the time we are in does ask of us a certain path is the alchemy of coming together to ask the big questions the course is asking us to consider.

This image was made in an area of communal property within a larger private space in a suburb outside of Chicago. It looks wild and is home to many creatures yet is surrounded by private homes and lawns which are not ecologically appropriate for the area. So there are tensions inherent in the image.

I also use the collodion as a nod to the early days of photography which also coincide with the beginning of the anthropocene, which might be thought of as the beginning of our time entering the great acceleration into technologies, the use of which propel us faster and faster into event horizons of seeking which we barely understand and are clearly with their dangers.

The content of this part of the course calls into question the matter of commons, both cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, over those which are privately owned tensions which I hope this image begins to address both formally and conceptually.

"Everyone who used the commons had a stake in preserving it for the next generation. During and especially after the Middle Ages in Britain and then Europe, common lands were gradually enclosed with fences and claimed as private property by people who were wealthy and powerful enough to be able to defend this appropriation by law and force of arms. The American suburb presents an iteration of this set of challenges and that is one of the things in my investigations." –Richard Heinberg,  Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership.

I think of this portrait as a visual representation of inter-being with the commons of the land.

The image was made in a part of Canada that has been subject to all kinds of trauma, which has largely been created by extractive practices of fishing, logging, manufacturing, etc. These systems break the land and the individuals who reside there. The traumas are passed on generationally amongst the people and on the land and all of the many beings who dwell there.

These communities, when functionally properly, flow in perfect reciprocity, exist in balance, thriving and surviving far into the future, into the 7th generation. When we are out of balance, taking more than is needed, with action based on greed and harmful privatization, this is how we arrive at our current moment.

This photo is an invitation using the visual metaphor, seeing the water, air, trees, and humans as entwined. I hope a dream we can still realize.

PART IV: BUILDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership

"Meanwhile, there are specific, immediately accessible ways to build equity in our communities through common ownership. One way is through the promotion of cooperative enterprises. The original purpose of corporations was to pool capital to achieve socially useful but risky purposes, like building a bridge or roadway. Cooperatives—or co-ops—pool capital as well, but they are owned by their workers and/or customers, thereby granting ownership to the very people most involved and interested in the enterprise. And cooperatives have a long history of success. Credit unions are cooperative banks; some utility companies operate as cooperatives, and there are also housing, manufacturing, and agricultural cooperatives. The thousands of cooperatives across America deliberately foster voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for the community." –Richard Heinberg,  Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership.