American Context

I was born in Arizona in 1985 to a conservative family of recent evangelical converts with a long-standing history of military service. I developed my own version of tunnel vision patriotism, which was reinforced by regular church attendance and daily conservative talk radio programs, like Rush Limbaugh, on the drive to and from school. Then, when I was in high school, 9/11 happened, followed by the invasion of Iraq, the Great Recession, Edward Snowden, and the rise of the information age of the Internet. As I developed a more critical lens, I realized that for many Americans truth had become a subjective abstraction.

In 2023, with an altered worldview, I began photographing scenes of chaos, unveiling the present without the benefit of context. My perspective about the state of the world - its unsustainability, violence, the sense of its unraveling - has found visual representation in inexplicable scenes found around me. Feeling unsettled has become the norm, and that underlying anxiety takes shape photographically in the brash colors of our flag, in natural light competing with the camera's flash, and in physical obfuscation of the scene.