The Blue Ridge

I am photographing the tourist towns that accompany the natural beauty of the mountains along The Blue Ridge Parkway. The most notable of the towns are Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg in Tennessee and Cherokee in North Carolina. The pure spectacle of the towns brimming with shopping, all-you-can-eat buffets, and pure entertainment, stop some visitors from even seeing the nature up close and unmediated. The attractions fascinate me as they speak to our deepest desires, like being close to wild animals and being transported to new fantastic places for escape. I am also interested in capturing the symbols of the area, like Dolly Parton, bears, and Indians.

The prints are 22”x28” Archival Inkjet Prints in edition of 15.

More Places For People
Free from the toils and cares of the work week and faced with the unstructured time of the weekend, many feel pressured to act productively during their spare time. People are often drawn to parks and open spaces nestled within the city in pursuit of holiday fecundity. In my leisure time, I photograph the wide and varied activities people do in these mostly undefined spaces, from staging civil war reenactments to simply sitting in one's car.

The prints are 22"x28" Archival Inkjet Prints in edition of 15.

Wonders
One of my favorite places to photograph is the Wisconsin Dells, the most popular tourist mecca in the Midwest. Once upon a time, the Dells was an attraction for the wild river and dramatic bluffs. Then the natural wonders were supplanted by commercial fantasies. Each resort, restaurant, and tourist amusement tried to compete for attention with appropriated landscapes, miniature world monuments, re-creations of lost civilizations, and bigger-than-life figures from history and mythology. One might stay in a Polynesian hotel and glance out the window to an African jungle miniature golf course. Down the street, one might visit a petting zoo and feed a giraffe or pet a kangaroo. Wisconsin is not an exotic state, and yet in the Wisconsin Dells and in other places near my home in Illinois I have the sense of being on a fantastic excursion. I capture the scenes of this voyage with the historic technique of pinhole photography.

The prints are 4"x5" Archival Inkjet Prints in edition of 15.

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