The sustainable food movement, a recent catch phrase for a practice that long precedes us, has reinvigorated our relationship to the landscape. Local farms have become temples to this movement. These romanticized patches of land are the backdrops for our fantasies about a harmonious participation in the landscape. Vegetables procured from Community Supported Agriculture enjoy a privileged status and suggest a better life through a perceived connection to the sources of our food. We seek to make this halcyon vision congruent with the many hours most of us spend inside. The landscape is a concept to be defined.
In my photographs of farms and their resulting fruits I reference the art historical impulse to use food as allegory and a more contemporary (mediated) relationship to the natural world. In the series Reclamation, I photographed the same family’s compost pile over the span of many months. Located in the back corner of a well-tended yard, the pile is wild, sprawling, and ever changing. I am interested in how the physicality of the pile changes with the seasons and references both cycles of time and the desires of a family. A centuries’ old agrarian practice reminds us of who we want to be.