Someday is Today

In 2014 I moved from Wisconsin to Rome. Moving to a city with both modern trappings and ancient ruins was simultaneously thrilling and disorienting. It was difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the span of time — measured in many hundreds, or even thousands, of years — that enveloped the city. I returned to Wisconsin in 2015, my stay in Rome lasting only a year. But my experience there left me contemplating how we both can and cannot comprehend time.

I grew up in a rather geographically unassuming part of Wisconsin and was always more fond of the landscape in the western part of the state. This region, known as the Driftless Area, encompasses southwestern Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. Over the past 2.5 million years the climate in the Northern Hemisphere has fluctuated between periods of warm and cold. During the last glacial period (which ended about 10,000 years ago) while much of the Midwest was covered in ice, the Driftless Area remained untouched, allowing natural erosion to continue dissecting the land as it has been doing for millions of years. As a result, unique geological features in this area stand in stark contrast to the surrounding areas that were flattened by glaciers.

Someday is Today is an attempt to contrast two vastly different senses of time: the human sense of time which we use to define our lives and deep time which is used to define the history of the planet. If one views the landscape as a record of activity, then the marks made by humans and those made by geological processes couldn’t be more different in terms of scale, interval, and permanence. To make photographs with this in mind is to depict a landscape shaped by timeless forces, yet intruded upon by man — forcing us to question the importance of our ephemeral existence when faced with nature’s slow and ceaseless expression.