Mojave Desert Aerial Explorations

2009

One of the primary concerns of my work is the duality between the beauty of the photograph as an physical object and the often destructive treatment of the landscape that revolves around the culture of recreation in my native Southern Californian desert.

This series of aerial photographs is part of a three-series body of work that includes photographs of objects collected from makeshift gun-ranges and graffiti covered rocks in and around where I grew up in Joshua Tree, California. Taken from the point of view of future explorers and archaeologists discovering and examining the remnants and traces of a lost civilization in the Southern California desert, this series stands as a record of a culture seemingly obsessed with leaving their mark on the world.