I used to be a determined Landscape photographer. 4x5, chromes, color neg, Polaroid... Not so much these days. At least, I rarely go looking for the ironic vista anymore, although they are increasingly hard to avoid.
In hindsight I find many of my landscape images to be absurdly romantic, like any good love affair.
What I think set them off from more traditional photographic renderings of the Southern landscape was a paradoxical fondness for the deliberate disregard we pay the very land which defines us. Like a bad but lasting marriage, the landscape is littered with relics of past transgressions and episodes, which I enthusiastically dredged up and re-contextualized with a mat and frame, like tales told at a cocktail party. “Remember that 1000 acres they clear-cut for The Scenic Highway near Grayson…? Hooboy!”
