My work is focused on the blurring of time, and Line of Sight continues the intersection and conflation of past and present begun with My Baghdad (2007) and Flow (2010. The ambrotype views captured with the 19th century wet collodion process for this project modifies our contemporary understanding of time, bending, folding, tugging it backwards along the sliding-scale of memory, challenging the viewer to question the ideas of progress, history, solitude, and America’s obsession with security.

Line of Sight is centered on the vast desert landscapes of the more remote border areas of southern Arizona, while grounded in the aesthetics and methods of the photographic images created during the great American West survey expeditions of the 1870s. Long stretches of the Arizona border, established in 1853 by the Gadsden Purchase and the lands surrounding it, have changed little since that time, marred only by the jarring appearance of modern surveillance equipment and operations.

The area of the Sonoran Desert these images were made in is the same desert that gave birth to the American legends of Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone. It is the same desert that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado plunged into searching for El Dorado. This landscape has been the stage upon which so much human theater has been played out. Although the desert boundary area is vast, providing ample opportunity to feel physically isolated from humanity, just about any location you might choose is now under surveillance by someone or some thing. From ragged hilltops, spotters working for drug and human traffickers lay in silence for days directing the movement of their shipments north. The U.S. government watches day and night by employing the latest military surveillance equipment ranging from fixed and mobile camera towers, UAVs, Areostat balloon systems, ground surveillance radar, seismic sensors, and helicopters. It is this seemingly empty yet watchful landscape that I am most interested in.

This intense, yet quiet, surveillance environment has developed along the once-invisible line drawn across the sand to represent the border between Arizona and Mexico. This line has become a monument to America’s recurring isolationism and post-9/11 security obsessions. Over time the line has gone from being marked only on inaccurate maps, to being delineated by numbered concrete obelisks, then cattle fence, followed by a patchwork of walls cobbled together from surplus military steel, to the most recent 25’ high double and triple-layered wall and vehicle barriers that now cuts across hundreds of miles of the landscape. Most people in the United States know of this modern-day Hadrian’s Wall now because it has become an icon of what so many see as both right and wrong along the border as well as with broader National Security and economic concerns.

With the photographic plates of Line of Sight, made with the same process, almost as slow and quiet as the landscape itself, that was used to first share the wonders of the western deserts with the world, I am engaging the landscape that has stood as silent witness to man’s deepest fears and desperations in the hope that it might show us something about ourselves.