Writing
The Yellow Book: Interstate Legacy
The Yellow Book is a nickname given to the 1955 Government document the “General Location of National System of Interstate Highways, 1955 US. Department of Commerce Bureau of Public Roads”. This book outlines the original plans where interstate highways were to be built in 104 cities with a population of over 50,000 people across the United States. In this ongoing project, I am visiting each of these cities to photograph the consequences and outcomes of the placements of these highways. In an overwhelming number of these cities, the interstates were specifically planned to go through, and ultimately devastate historic black communities. As this book was created in the 1950s, it directly reflects the systemic racism in city planning. As I have been working on this project, I have discovered a revealing portrait of the history of American cities. In some cities, community organizations succeeded in changing highway plans, in others, little parts of black neighborhoods remain, and gentrification has run rampant. And in others, wars are currently waging against highway expansion projects, and debates to remove elevated highways. I believe this work has critical and timely importance as our government of today revisits and reexamines the infrastructure bill and we as a country reckon with systemic racism. I began this work exclusively in Baton Rouge, LA in 2018 in the historic black neighborhood of Old South Baton Rouge, where I live, and have witnessed the consequences of the interstate I-10. I believe it is of great importance to expand the project and traverse the country to create a record 66 years later as to what the interstates did each city and the people who live in them, as outlined in The Yellow Book.
Resources:
Yellow Book Map Scans, Wikimedia Commons, by Adam Froehlig from the book Bureau of Public Roads
The Yellow Book: Old South Baton Rouge
The Bottom is a series of photographs that are an investigation of the historic neighborhood Old South Baton Rouge in Louisiana. The elevated interstate is the framework for this series. I photograph the physicality of the highway, using it as a shadow over this place. The small houses that sit virtually underneath it, the barriers it creates, the traffic it invites through the community. I am looking closely at how it was built through this formerly segregated, low-income neighborhood. This is the neighborhood I live in, and I am photographing the landscape, residents, and historical documents to look at how the past has shaped this area. While examining this history, I am documenting the future, as the highway is currently being expanded, with another series of homes and businesses scheduled to be razed.
Originally, this area was the Magnolia Mound Plantation. It was sold and divided into small shotgun lots in the early 1900s, by design creating a low-income neighborhood. It was a thriving and self-sustained neighborhood during segregation in the 1950s. It was desegregation and the building of the I-10 highway that drove the area to near collapse in the 1960s. The title The Bottom references a name given to the community because it sits below a fault line and is prone to flooding, a name that refers to the poverty of the area, and a name that references it sitting in the shadows of the elevated highway. I photograph city plans and maps juxtaposed with torn down houses and my neighbors to create a portrait of this community. I recognize that histories are often told from the person with the most power and I understand my privilege in making these photographs. I work closely with my neighbors photographing repeatedly and collaboratively to carefully negotiate my responsibility in how I am representing them. I hope the deteriorating infrastructure and highway can speak to the history of segregation while I strive for the portraits to show the happiness, anger, love, and sadness of the residents. I carefully consider the use of color and black and white to portray a blur between past and present, with the neighborhood youth caught in the in-between. I use flash to present the photographs as evidence. In exhibitions, the highway images are hung high on the wall to represent its domination over the area. I want the photographs to show the complexities of both people and place, and my experience living here. There is little visual history that exists for this area despite its historic importance during the civil rights era. I photograph to make a record that can hopefully draw a connection between past decisions and current consequences.
The neighborhood is continually changing, some parts for the good, some for the worse. I will document these changes, and the current expansion of the highway to make a long-term record. I believe this project is important to tell this history that has been greatly looked over. I want the greater community to understand why this area is low-income, and that it is a place that was designed by systemic racism. This story is not unique to Old South Baton Rouge but occurred in low-income neighborhoods across the entire country. A greater expansion of this work will be to research and photograph the 104 cities included in the government document, The Yellow Book, from 1955 which detailed the then proposed Interstate Highway System.
Monuments to Strangers
In this work, I utilize news images and materially re-contextualize them to emphasize the limitations of photography as an emotionally and factually accurate record of the time. I combine analogue and digital processes to underscore the ways in which news photographs have been produced and how that production affects our understanding of cultural history. The photographs look at the selective representation of the individual within printed daily newspapers from the 1880s to the 1960s.
The figures in the blocks are unknown, but they were at one point important, or significant enough, to have their image produced in this way. The images reveal how versions of history were presented publicly. I photograph to highlight how women and minorities were vastly under represented, and in re-presenting these images hope to reveal and question our flawed history. The images are etched into copper or zinc, creating long lasting portraits that have proven permanence over time. I imagine the names of the figures, question what they were once important for, and explore the social context behind them. I don’t seek to make a document as they were used before, but to photograph them as visual monuments. Men are abundant; women are few and far between. The images pertain to births, graduations, professions, weddings and obituaries. Through these images a story begins to evolve of the major life events and rights of passage that people continually move through then and now.
The objects I photograph were originally made by a photomechanical process to reproduce photographs for publication and is an invention of Fox Talbot’s. It was the first time in history images of reality could be reproduced on presses reaching the public, rather than an image interpreted and altered by hand. While in use for over 80 years, it was an imperfect process that eventually was made redundant by offset printing in the 1960s. An outdated process, today these blocks have no use. They have become antiquated, much like the newspapers that they were once printed in. I am photographing them to present this historic process and lost imagery in a new way, using the technologies that made them obsolete. In re-photographing these images, my photographs are several iterations of light sensitive materials being exposed; the original photograph, the rephotographed negative, the photomechanical produced block, and my exposure. Each image thus goes from a positive, to a negative, recorded once again as a negative, then inverted to a positive. It is in this long chain of events, which traverses over decades, that the glow of light and color occurs. Together I strive for the photographs to describe the history of representation in American daily newspapers, as well as the history of photography.
In the Printed Woman series, I use the original antique printing block and ink it onto a sheet of film in the darkroom. I then expose the sheet of film with a flash and process it. The resulting print is then scanned and made into an inkjet print.
Between the Ground & Sky
These photographs were made photographing the changing landscape of the Danby Marble Quarry in Dorset Mountain, Vermont. The Danby Quarry has been in use since the 18th century, it is over a mile long, has a footprint of twenty-five acres and is 1ó mile deep. It is the largest underground marble quarry in the world.
I began photographing the marble curious about its use but eventually became charmed by the physical history carved into the space. The heavy unyielding material takes a geometric form inside a huge organic landscape. I am fascinated by the constant metamorphosis of the space. Etched, carved and broken apart Danby Mountain is a record of time. The physical markings inside the mountain created by the both the original method and the current method of quarrying is at the center of my interest due to its impact on the nature of the mountain. From the beginning of quarrying there to today the technology has vastly changed and is visible inside the walls of the quarry. In the shallowest depths the quarry reveals the chaos of past axe quarrying in the ceiling, showing every stroke each man took while the more recently excavated spaces reveal the control of diamond rope cutting into precise geometric cubes. Each method has left an indelible impression on the mountain by destroying its natural state and creating a geometric and ordered new landscape. These are the qualities that I find both interesting and intriguing. I am fascinated by it’s now formal beauty.
My photographs of Dorset Mountain undulate between buried underground, immersed in darkness to being elevated into the sky and mountains, overcome by light. The sense of where you are is confused by ever changing planes of focus. The ground and ceiling, up and down, become indistinguishable. I photograph little to indicate scale, rather creating a world where a mountain can be a pebble, a crevice can be a valley and a stone can be a grave. Through photographic examination I hope to reveal the captivating landscape of this place while evoking a sense of its history and question how it will continue to change in the future.
I began my work at Dorset Mountain but am in the process of moving both south and north along the Vermont marble trail that spans from Bennington to Montpelier and Swanton VT. I am also in the process of photographing where the excavated marble ended up and what it was ultimately used for. Largely, it has been used for gravestones and it is still currently being used for those of American Veterans. The photographs are made using a 4x5 camera on film, then scanned and printed as archival inkjet prints.
All That Love Allows
This series of photographs about my family is titled All That Love Allows. These photographs are a personal investigation of the changing relationships within my family. Photographing my Mom, Dad, and two brothers I am examining how aging and distance has changed our relationships, and how the lines of what I believe are normal have become blurred. It is a curious and strange time in our family as my mother is now aging and ailing and we, as her children, now care for her. My father holds onto the idea of my brothers and me as young children while my younger brother is neither child nor man. I still long for the days when we could all still fit and cuddle in the same bed on Saturday mornings. The expectations between children and parents have been curiously, and questionably reversed. These photographs are about the sadness and confusion of illness and aging, nostalgia for childhood, and an insecurity about the future. To make these photographs I stage my family within the family home in poses and situations that are from my memories, reflecting real and imagined occurrences. They are the staged family photograph, referencing both a theatre in photography as well as the familiarity of family snapshots.