One woman’s peaceful country life can create restless introspection for another. Wandering Garland County, Arkansas, felt similar to exploring my backyard as a child. I spend my childhood hunting for the perfect fort beneath the pine trees so I could be alone and daydream. The countryside of Arkansas sparked a similar search.

I didn’t find country life to be peaceful. The empty roads and open space were haunting as I looked for something to photograph that would express the sensation of being alone and lost in the country.

Objects sparkling off in the distance distracted me, just as they did when I was a child, and I ended up stumbling upon someone else’s patch of privacy hidden in the woods. I was compelled to shoot with a low depth of field to keep the moments private because I didn’t want to reveal their secret hiding spots, just expose a glimpse of the isolated landscape.

These diversions, in turn, reflect my unresolved curiosity to examine what lies in the shadows of the backyards around Garland County. My non-conventional landscapes are fractions of land pieced together; creating my vision of the solitude that lingers in the backcountry of Arkansas.

1/15 of a Second Series

This project involves looking for certain visual arrangements to express what I perceive as city dwellers wandering like zombies. I photograph city landscapes and capture strangers drifting through the space seemingly not noticing each other or the architecture surrounding them. I deliberately photograph people out of focus just enough to make you feel like you have seem them before while reinforcing the point that we rarely pay attention to individuals walking by.

The flow of the blurry figures visually expresses the muffled sounds of the urban environment and suggests the feeling of people swimming past one another. I played with the space between each figure to exaggerate the interaction of what I observe as pedestrians playing hopscotch along the sidewalk trying to sustain anonymity within the city machine.

This series is a work in progress currently including 50 images. These scenes are from London, New York, and Chicago reinforcing the universals present in urban pedestrian behavior.