Re-enactment (winter’s campaign), 2003

This photo-report is inspired by the luminous white refusal of snowy landscape.  Winter’s cold and light assert a season of brilliant blankness over the solid terrain of history, memory and definite emotion.  These images elaborate on the phenomenon of splendid obfuscation that snow suggests.  They are picturesque, cold and perhaps treacherous.

The photographic description of place often asks viewers to enter a landscape as the site of historical or psychological narrative.  These photographs begin to invite this involvement – through scenic descriptions, punctuated by occasional, obliquely struggling figures – but the literal and figurative suggestion is always arrested by what we can’t see past, or into, or clearly.

I have recently spent a good deal of time in a somewhat distant and undeniably colder place.  This episode has corresponded with a pervasive feeling of ignorance – in my own life, and in the miserable drift of world events. One may look into the block of ice where emotional and moral sense lie, but the chill around them seems terribly thick. The snow is general, and it feels something like this.

Archival pigment prints, dimensions variable.