Even the Stones Will Flow
This is an in-progress series that investigates the phenomenon of mountain erosion. In September of 2020 — at the beginning of the pandemic — I took a month-long road trip in the western United States. I was looking for a new way in to making photographs and I figured it was a good idea to get out of Wisconsin, where I’d made the majority of my work. I made a lot of photographs on that trip, but I kept returning to a picture I made of a scree slope just outside of Yellowstone National Park. There was something very pure about it. Just a vast field of small rocks that had chipped off of a much larger rock over the course of many thousands of years.
The photographs in this series eschew anything fleeting or ephemeral, depicting a process that operates on an entirely different timescale than that of the human-centric world. We’re living in a time of potentially catastrophic climate change and political instability — all the result of human activity and endeavors. Perhaps there is comfort in contemplating something that lies outside of what we’ve created.
The majority of these photographs were created on a trip to Iceland. I plan to revisit the western U.S. and Europe in the near future to make more pictures for this series.