Field Book

Field Book is a meditation on place and the mythology surrounding life in the Southwestern United States. Photographed around Pima County, Arizona, this work focuses on the shifting and interconnected social landscape of the southwest and those who inhabit the dusty topography of Southern Arizona.  Field Book examines a region an hour north of the contested United States-Mexico border to study a far more complicated relationship to the western landscape; one that counters the familiar political rhetoric of fear or photographic tropes of weathered miners. Instead, we peek into the lives of those on the fringes of the western frontier and find familiarities within our own lives. Since 2016, I have made collaborative portraits with close friends, family, and strangers to assemble a web of those who are all bound by the common thread of this landscape that defines the contours of our being. 

Growing up working as a Land Surveyor in the Arizona desert, I spent most of my time roaming the open desert with a GPS to make topographic maps. The title of this work comes from the name of the small book that we would bring to each survey to record our movement through the land. Field Book reimagines the traditional field book as a photographic survey of the rugged landscape and those who occupy the same hills that raised me.