In the summer of 2004, I began exploring and photographing some of the remaining fragments of old-growth redwood forests in the state parks of Del Norte County, California. In the course of what I realized would become a long-term project—to make the equivalent of a series of intricate, formal portraits of the forest itself—I became increasingly interested in the small town of Crescent City, which lies on the outskirts of the Jedediah Smith state park (and which was in fact cut out from the forest that abuts it).
Over time, I noticed that I was increasingly affected by the town’s architecture, its emotional tenor, its political and religious culture, and the complex and sometimes unconscious relationship that the people who live there have with the corralled forest to the east and to the Pacific Ocean, which lies on the western edge of town and represents the end of the Western frontier. The stark contrast between the radical, ancient, and spectacularly ornate environment of the forest and the disposable dystopian architecture and trashed landscape of Crescent City have come to undergird the narrative structure of a project with a much larger scope—one that has expanded to include the forest, the town, portraits of the townspeople, and, finally, the ocean.
This work is located in a tradition of fine-art photography that takes contemporary America as its subject and is an amalgam of exploration, documentation, implied social critique, and empathic alienation. What is perhaps new in the context of this mix is a strong elemental quality. While these pictures suggest the current state of American culture and the particulars of a small town, they also allude to pre-historical time and to the origins of biological life—oceans and forests— and to the imperiled future of life vis-à-vis environmental mismanagement and human over-reaching. The portraits of the town’s inhabitants are largely studies of people who are fighting hard battles; people who are vulnerable; people, who, not unlike the forest itself, have little control over the larger (and largely unseen) forces that dictate not just their lives but ours as well.
- Richard Rothman
Source richardrothman.com