Sweep
Created between 2013 and 2015, Sweep uses the language of photography to express a connection to the world and the land that transcends literalism. The series began as a response to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, whose formal restraint and meditative power profoundly influenced my thinking about photography. After seeing this work, I felt a powerful drive to replicate its formal qualities in my own environment. However, I quickly found that the landscape of North Texas did not lend itself well to a similar minimalist aesthetic. Unlike Japan, it lacks both large bodies of water and any natural variation in elevation.
Faced with this problem, I decided to use the blurring effect of camera movement to my advantage. Each image was made through deliberate horizontal camera movement during long exposures, reducing the landscape to bands of color and value. Images were reduced to three components - land, horizon, and sky. Pastures, fences, artificial lakes, and parking lots became fields and lines of color. By radically reducing detail and literal representation, Sweep allows one to contemplate the sublime reality of a place. The images do depict a place, but also the passage of time and the ephemerality of our existence.
