A Somber Autumn Drive on Wasco Heppner Highway In Eastern Oregon

This photograph reflects a melancholy feeling I have about our current era. Economic depression, wars and worries about the environment and the future of our children are never far from my mind.  My empty nest, a new stage of life with my struggling acceptance that things evolve and sometimes end, pushed me out to Eastern Oregon in search of solitude and solace. It will be borne. The piece is a bit lonely yet the lively colors on the side of the road and the sun trying to break through mimic the tug-of-war that is playing out in my head.

Abandoned building in a town that is located on Europe's westernmost shoreline.

This is the final photograph taken on a journey to Iceland, a place of unearthly beauty. This small abandoned hut speaks to my interest in our patterns of migration. I have long adored the photographs of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. He has documented migration patterns around the globe and his work is a testament to the human casualties of migration. On trips to Africa I attempted to mimic his style. Traveling in developing countries with a camera it is nearly impossible to sort out and make sense of all of the themes – geopolitical, biological, sociological, geographical, historical and on and on. A short trip becomes a rather compelling intro to the unedited and not very kind human story and it’s hard to view the world with the same eyes after seeing the slums of Johannesburg or spending time with the street kids in Lusaka who spend their days looking for glue to sniff to quell their hunger pains.

Iceland spoke to me – of course – in a very different way and a journey there is absolutely an inverse experience to that described above. The migration has reshaped the country but the toll is quieter. Gorgeous landscapes are filled with empty houses on desolate fjords. These lonely landscapes cry out to to the Montanan in me, the girl who grew up on the last house on the edge of a prairie town. I felt that I could stay forever and loved the solitude. Of course for the people who left their homes on the fjords there is no way for me to discover their lives and their hardships on a 3 week journey.

In Iceland there has been a very significant movement of people from the country to the city. In a country of 300,000 citizens, only a third that number live outside Reykjavik. Elders were pulled away from their country roots by their modern children and into the city. There is a classic Icelandic film called “Children of Nature”  that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1992. The film was directed by Friðrik Thor Fridriksson. It is an unforgettable, picturesque and poetic road-movie about an old couple from the countryside, disliking Reykjavik and its inhabitants, and they escape from the home for senior citizens where their children have placed them. They steal a jeep and manage to cross moutains and waves to a beloved remote spot in the western fjords.

I admit to traveling around the road that circles the entire country with an eye mostly to this human phenomenon and would recommend that you do the same if you are interested in history and stories and the why that is behind changing civilization. My husband is a geology enthusiast and his excitement on the trip was more focused on the extraordinary natural beauty. When I shot this image he was going crazy over the lava. This small home is in Útnesvegur, in the West Fjords, about as far west as it is possible to go in Europe.

Broad Empty Valley In Eastern Oregon Near Hepner

Another quiet scene. Every few hours I pass another car and occasionally a farmer stops to talk to me as I shoot. It can be interesting. I wonder how the time passes out here where it is necessary to be so self-reliant. Town is far away and so are the neighbors. “How did you meet your wife”, I asked John, an eighty five-year-old who occasionally drives his wife to Seattle for a chance to eat at a “fancy place”.  John is out driving on this little road in his beater of a truck. He met his “sweetheart” when they were just kids; when her father abandoned his farm in Oklahoma during the dustbowl to find work in the west. As I drive, I can’t stop thinking about how it must have been in the 1930’s for these farmers. There is the physical place, so haunting and sweetly beautiful and now the story of John’s family that lives in this photograph.

A Dusty Road in Northern Montana on an October Day

Yesterday I drove 12 hours, starting out near Butte, Montana and crossing the I-90 Bridge into Seattle around 7 pm. I traveled with my two sons, Henry and Jackson. Henry is a rising hip-hop and r&b artist in the Northwest. He goes by the name “Scribes.” For most of the trip we listened to selections from his iPod and I was grateful to be exposed to some amazing tracks. Nas, Tupac, Nelly Furtado, Michael Jackson, Big K.R.I.T, Sting, The Who, Pearl Jam and of course, Scribes. I contrast the hard-edged and utterly compelling music of my sons’ generation with the music I heard growing up in Montana in the 60’s and 70’s and contemplate the cultural shifts between then and now, between growing up in the country and being a young person in a city in 2011, and it would be easy to feel overwhelmed. Yet I love their music and accept that who they are is a very different animal than who I was in a small town in Montana in 1976.

Favorites then in my world were Johhny Cash and June Carter, Johnny Horton, Hank Williams and Glen Campbell. No kidding. That was our music.

Last October I photographed the Sawtooth Mountains in Northern Montana just outside of the east entrance to Glacier National Park and this shot perfectly captures the Montana vibe from my childhood. Pretty much it stays the same. Blue skies, a dusty unpaved road stretching on for countless miles and the classic ranchers’ fence – lodge pole pines that have been stripped of their bark and crisscrossed to keep cattle and horses on the property and maybe a few coyotes out. An interesting aside about this photo is that I shoot stock for a company called cgi backgrounds. They provide images for cars and this was one of their picks. I’m pretty sure it will be used for a two-ton pickup ad. How perfect. There are a lot of trucks in Montana. Some of them have Scribes blasting away on the CD players.

Left Aside In A Changing World

Yet another of my abandoned houses and one of my favorite images. I worked very hard to get this shot, waiting out gale force winds and trying the patience of Natalie, my step-daughter, who was with me on this shoot. We passed a trailer that had been blown over on its side and thought that the wind we were experiencing was just a typical day in Iceland. It wasn’t. We didn’t get our shot the first day so returned later in the week and the winds had died down. I love the poetry of this photograph. It reminds me of my grandmother’s house on Bere Island in Western Ireland. It expresses a longing for place that is surely imprinted in my genes. The title of the body of work that includes this photograph, I WANT US TO GO WEST is a single line from a book by Irish author Niall Williams, The Fall Of Light. Many of the titles of my photographs are tiny fragments of sentences from favorite books and authors, which I keep in a journal. Though most of the photos in I WANT US TO GO WEST are scenes from the American West I broadly interpret that “West” is a state of mind and in my life this notion has loomed large.

Summer Shadow In Washington Palouse Country

A simple, timeless summer scene.  A moment that is very removed from troubling or difficult ideas. It’s open to interpretation and a little bit about escape. When I made the shot I was thinking quite a lot about solitude and being “away” from it all. Yet I also wonder when I see this shot about living out on the land and how I would adapt to the absolute quiet of farm life. The telephone pole reminds me that I was born in another age, before cloud computing and a kind of interconnectedness that makes this scene look like something from the very distant past. In Seattle we wait a bit for summer to arrive, a bit behind most of the country. A few hours east, over the Cascade Mountains and into The Palouse, it’s easy to find plenty of sun and warmth, something we crave here in the Puget Sound region.

It Was What They Made It

These days a house like this in the middle of nowhere is maybe a meth lab. I didn’t have that suspicion when I noticed the excellent arrangement of elements within the scene. Recently I was warned that it is something to look for out there – metal or plastic drums filled with explosive chemicals. This warning has changed the way I see the photograph. I realize that I am a fairly innocent traveler and I can ignore a pretty significant piece of a story because I am looking for a picture that feels right. An innocent white house with tin siding, windows and doors that are perfect cutouts in complementary colors plunked down on an expansive open field and shot in the middle of the day.

A Ragged Line

A surreal rural scene imbued with hidden threats, hints of violence. Knowing the American West as I do, I look around for men in big trucks with gun racks on the back window, dogs panting, ready for the hunt, especially in this season. I get a little paranoid when I am driving for days on these small roads in America. It’s possible that what I am half expecting to encounter, this dangerous idea or situation, is maybe just over the hill. I’m thinking about the second amendment and the divisions in my own family over guns. There is so much poetry for me here in this moment yet I don’t want to linger. I feel quite fearful. A few quick clicks of my shutter and I quickly return to my car.

Cement Factory in Akranes, Iceland

In deciding to travel to Iceland I studied the internet to get an idea of the kinds of pictures I might make there. I am not a nature photographer, though I found the abundance of stunning photographs of Iceland on the web that depicted its wild nature to be quite breathtaking. I decided that Iceland would be an interesting challenge, that I might be compelled to take my sturdy rented jeep into the mountains to shoot nature unleashed. As is typical of my “eye”, this shot of a cement factory was one of the first photographs of the trip. I was mesmerized by the cold grey symmetry and the placement of the somewhat ugly industrial scene smack dab in the middle of the glorious Hvalfjörður fjord not far from Reykjavik. I found the shot to be beautiful and glorious and I sent a version of it home to friends and family, some of whom were puzzled or amused that in a place as heavenly as Iceland I would be immediately drawn to a scene as mundane as this. I am very interested in seeing how people live and in cataloging our similarities. Perhaps  when we think of Iceland we don’t necessarily think first of the country’s need to make cement, but it is there to be seen.

Rusted Train Cars Sitting Alongside The Snake River In Idaho

This is a photograph that just happens to work very well. Because this body of work is, in part, about beautiful scenes created by unseemly relationships when human artifacts seem to emerge up and out of sacred earth, my encounter with the rusty old train cars was simply fortuitous and works with other pieces in an exhibit that I had at the Art Stable in Seattle’s South Lake Union. Always there is serendipity out on the road.  I will search for days to find a photograph. My hunt is driven by a visual aesthetic and ambition but also by my interest in the stories I can imagine and then see in the landscape and by what I know of the history of a place.