The sky beckoned me up to the rugged crest above the high plains stretching off to the West. In searching for some elevation to see the land from a greater height, I hoped a grander view and the accumulation of further visional surveillance would sustain my beliefs. But to surveil these lands is an endless pursuit. Instead I found a collection of trees up among the riven rocks and cracked boulders.

They seemed to be growing out of the earth in astonishing ways. Some scraggly, some bending. Others flying like the wind.

The salubrious holler hills of Eastern Kentucky gave me the history I was after. Along the Banks of the Ohio, I found the residential peace and charm of life at home.  In the far Western section of the state, I discovered the open wounds of lives torn apart by a tornado. These images were created during the month of April 2022 upon being commissioned by the Kentucky Documentary Photo Project to travel the state. Working on a County by County basis using my large format 8x10" inch camera, the commission grew in personal meaning as I traveled the State.  Wherever I went, the landscape and its people opened up to my camera. 

Anticipation grew as I imagined what might transpire once onboard. Leaving every half hour “the Boat” crosses from The City to The Island. For that brief half hour, I feel connected with each lover, loner, tourist and commuter on board. We take the journey together. Tourists gaze at the Statue while abandoning themselves to the wild, wasteful ocean air of New York Bay are weary commuters. Each of these experiences became interesting to me when I returned to the Staten Island Ferry as a commuter. A long time ago, I had taken this journey. I rode it for fun as a child. Now I rode it for necessity. I carried my camera with me as I rode the Ferry each day. The rich color palette and its expressive riders began to interest me. It seems like no other place offers so much potential to see people, to spy, to catch someone in a rare second of private repose. It is unique to the Boat because living in New York City forces us into inhuman psychic paces. There is little room to slow down. The twenty five minute voyage on the Staten island Ferry allows me to stop and look outward, or inward. It became a break in the day when the journey was more important than the destination.

I began photographing on the Ferry in 2017 when I returned home to New York City after six months photographing in Carbon County, Wyoming. Since March 2019, this vibrant ferry life has all but vanished. Each time I take the boat I reflect on those days with the camera, before the city and our world changed forever.

The wagon ruts were quieted when the transcontinental railroad was built in 1869.  Now people fly, or drive across Interstate Highways missing all the little whistle stops that are quiet along the nearby two-lane roads.  Since America's destiny was deemed manifest (for better or worse), the landscape here has often been crossed in search of something more such as: California Gold, Utah Salt, or Oregon Timber.  Carbon County, Wyoming was named after extensive coal deposits, when the Union Pacific Railroad began mining the area to fuel its steam locomotives. This is a region where American women first received the right to vote, and bandits such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid roamed, and robbed.

After an artist residency in 2015, I quickly became enamored with this land.  As a native borne New Yorker, it beckoned me to return, and in 2017 as a result I sought employment at a private dude ranch.  Wyoming and Carbon County grew ever larger in my imagination after we settled in as a family. Through popular culture I inherited a false mythos of the American West as a place of abundance and adventure.  I strove to unburden myself from this flawed perception as I began searching for a notion of a True West shaped through a better understanding of its history. A metaphor within the title revealed itself.  Carbon is to unquenchable desire for experience and resource, as County is to its untenable, bordered end.