This is the transmission of a citizen who seems comfortable sitting with the knowledge that he is as intrigued by his home as he is alarmed by it. These photographs are as much about the American roadside as they are about the infinitely flat and delusional digital landscape, a place where reverence is arbitrarily distributed between the meaningful and meaningless components of our world, both existing and extinct.
If Christmas in America is a thematic and visual exercise in American Maximalism, these images are deceptively nuanced photographs of—and for—an America that has done everything it can to abolish nuance, creating bleached-out stand-ins for the place itself.
It’s hard to ignore the current collective fear of losing one’s version of America—one’s way of life—and the fear that it, too, is fleeting. It’s as if the concept of America is unsharable. Here, you will find surreal postcards from a fever dream—a feeling of familiar uneasiness, as if something is missing or has been plucked out of the frame. Erased.
As this project nears completion, I have realized these works are less of a social commentary on those navigating their fears and ultimately a projection of my own.
Fear of aging and the chapter of my youth fully closed as the passage of time accelerates.
Fear of new technology and my own obsolescence.
Fear of our distressed natural world.
Fear of continual instability, both financially and politically.
Fear of losing the life I have built, constantly recalculating expectations and promises.
Maybe it is my America Folklore that is vanishing.
*** and [two](/collections/escalaras/)](https://d1sf55qlb7p6hz.cloudfront.net/sfp_reg-9.jpg)
*** and [two](/collections/escalaras/)](https://d1sf55qlb7p6hz.cloudfront.net/sfp-23.jpg)
