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"I thought I would feel more. What I wasn't expecting was this disconnect between the blankness of these nearly anonymous spaces and the depth of sorrow they were supposed to contain. It was with this in mind that, after selecting a dozen photographs, I developed them into 16' x 20' Type C color prints. As I organized the show and thought about what to include on each photograph's placard, it occurred to me that what I had been fighting against, what had created such unease in me, was the realization of how ahistorical it all felt. Here were these spaces that were supposed to be defined by the human events that had happened within them, yet they refused to act or look their part. Increasingly, these landscapes, as photographed, seemed indifferent toward the narratives that had marked them on the map. My unease came from my guilt that I was actively making photographs that encouraged the act of forgetting. Yet that guilt led to a compositional choice: maybe by refusing political geography and not naming these spaces on the placards, the photographs might begin to restore some other narrative: some story that was perhaps previous, or beside the historical one; one that wasn't totally recognizable but still signified."
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A very intriguing read. It read like a stream of consciousness. Like reading an abstract painting, there is so much there if only we look. In ways it's also meditative, as the imagery, as described by the protagonist, a photographer, assists you in seeing the American landscape through his eyes and lens. It's a book that I probably should read again, as it left me with many questions. The only quarrel I have is that it has very long paragraphs and I like some white space to give me a chance to reflect on what I've read.