North American Settings
As individuals, we experience our surroundings in our own unique ways, shaped by our life experiences, acting in what can sometimes seem like a life-long performance. These events in our lives, from the mundane to the dramatic, all have a setting. These photographs investigate setting, and it's relationship with the unknown bystander. Drawing inspiration from Albert Bierstadt who belonged to the American Rocky Mountain school, these photographs depict individuals as an element of the settings they exist within, effectively becoming as essential to the landscape as the tree or rock itself. Bierstadt's depictions of struggles and triumphs on the journey west rarely afforded those depicted with identities, and instead took it as a matter of course, that where there's land, there's people. Travelling the country and making my own journey out west, the people I saw and photographed along the way became the very landscapes they resided within. In some capacity, we are all actors in someone else's production. Until first contact is made, we remain simply a fixture of the environment we are within. Identity does not extend beyond the skin, and presence is relative to interpretation.