Shinnecock Days Statement
My pictures are of people at liminal edges, at the boundaries of land and sea. Looking at
landscape as a place of cultural habitation, I’ve photographed at the water's edge on the east end of Long Island for the past ten years.
Tidal change occupies me in my new work-in-progress, as I follow the shoreline from Montauk to Southampton. There resides a different and older Hampton community: the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Though their tribal land borders one of America’s most affluent areas, the tribe has lived apart and in their own way for hundreds of years.
With their permission, I have been visiting their land, making pictures of young women in their tribal regalia, often at the boundary line of land and sea. Working with a large format camera and wet collodion, my photographic time with them is slow, deliberate and interactive.
While there, I have noticed in their demeanor and their expressions the way their culture, worn so clearly on the outside and expressed so fundamentally from the inside, stands in stark contrast to the world beyond this tract of land, a world of privilege and excess. Exploring cultural identity and 19th century photographic practices, it is possible to create a provocative juxtaposition of the past in the present moment.
Tidal change occupies me in my new work-in-progress, as I follow the shoreline from Montauk to Southampton. There resides a different and older Hampton community: the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Though their tribal land borders one of America’s most affluent areas, the tribe has lived apart and in their own way for hundreds of years.
With their permission, I have been visiting their land, making pictures of young women in their tribal regalia, often at the boundary line of land and sea. Working with a large format camera and wet collodion, my photographic time with them is slow, deliberate and interactive.
While there, I have noticed in their demeanor and their expressions the way their culture, worn so clearly on the outside and expressed so fundamentally from the inside, stands in stark contrast to the world beyond this tract of land, a world of privilege and excess. Exploring cultural identity and 19th century photographic practices, it is possible to create a provocative juxtaposition of the past in the present moment.