Dusted
Within my hometown, the remains of mining’s power over the land are ever-present, from growth to collapse, reclamation and current advancements. Growing up in the shadow of Sutter's Mill and the California Gold Rush, my life was informed by the history of mining as it shaped the world around me. Traveling across California, Nevada and Arizona this history took new complex shapes as the ravaged and toxic land spread for miles. Through these experiences, Dusted grew out of my need to address and question this expanding history of mining in Western America.
In traveling across Western America and spending time within these scarred mining lands, I found the landscape didn’t reflect the glorified narratives of history, but conveyed the destruction and carelessness of the past, in doing so it has continued the exploitation of the present. I experienced these continuing ideas of Manifest Destiny perpetually pursued within these mining companies as they take land, deplete resources, shutter, and move on, leaving an abandoned populous and a chopped toxic landscape all among stolen land. Seeing and experiencing this devastation and forever scars on the land across these different states charged me to create Dusted.
Through creating Dusted, I felt motivated and challenged as a creator in investigating these stories, losses, conflicts, and continued harm, while developing an understanding of the many contradicting aspects of history in biographical, reenacted and Hollywood's portrayal of mining and life in the West. Through years of traveling and expanding this work, I found reason through time in the field photographing, conversing and assembling a sequence that responds to and conveys the obscure, personal and true effects of mining on the land and people. In challenging the words of the past and revealing what was left in the wake of false promises and lies created by these companies in their conquests, I look to inform and communicate the stories within the land and show the continued effects mining has on nature and people.
All photographs created over 2017-current