statement:
Cycles: Panoramas of Place and Time
Cycles originate from the desire to use photography as a means to capture and celebrate cyclical change. All the photographs were taken within my suburban neighborhood north of Boston. After years of photographing areas in the West associated with wilderness, I felt that I should look at and discover places, closer to home.
While these landscapes are conceptually based, the spirit of the work is to acknowledge that within our world there are forces at work, rhythmic in nature, far more powerful than us.
A Cycle of Life, Middlesex Fells and A Cycle of Commerce, Mahoney's Garden Center each use the grid to combine photographs into one panoramic landscape of place and expanded time. Both projects were started on the Vernal Equinox and ended at the Winter Solstice. The columns represent the months from going from March to December. The rows represent multiple perspectives. With A Cycle of Life the perspectives range from various views of the forest floor upward to more general views, with a representative detail between. With A Cycle of Commerce the perspectives are horticultural: annuals along the bottom, then perennials, shrubs and trees, all of which form an ideal garden.
At a Neighbor's Garden showcases a personal as well as a cultural interpretation of seasonal change.
A Sunset, Meadow Glen Mall references the seasonal setting of the sun that occurs at the end of our year. Once a month, from August to December near 5:00 pm, the changing quality of light was photographed at a local mall. I chose the Meadow Glen Mall for its façade and to include a suburban response to the loss of light.
If you have questions about the acquisition of these images or their use as an installation (34 linear feet), please contact David Mussina.
 Installation View of A Cycle of Life, Middlesex Fells Reservation |
Civil Wilds: Encounters with Nature in Our National Parks
Wishing to reference the changing concept of wilderness I began this project in the late 1970's. My intent was to travel to those National Parks historically associated with wilderness and photograph what was experienced and seen. Feeling a kinship with the survey photographers from the late 1800's I wanted to capture our slice of time.
These places, being far different from their past representations of wilderness, revealed to me aspects of our distance from the natural world. I was struck by how the sublime views of Watkins, Muybridge, Jackson, and others, had been transformed into a carefully laid out itinerary of crowded scenic stops and adventures. As a visitor I became aware that I was one of those very tourists traveling thousands of miles to see and capture on film the grand western view. The playing out of this contradiction between tourism and wilderness as well as photography’s role in the formation of this odd union became principle aspects of this work.
If you have questions about the acquisition of these images or their exhibition, please contact David Mussina.