HomeWork: Photographs from Taos, New Mexico
2004 - continuing
HomeWork addresses our imperative to site our lives within a landscape, to belong to a place and people.
I make portraits of houses; houses alone, in clusters, all within a landscape. Each shelter is a metaphor for its inhabitants whose hopes, values and histories are written in adobe, wood, paint and peel. I photograph houses under construction, newly finished, in their prime, maintained, modified, deteriorated, abandoned, eroded and finally gone.
With its pronounced cultural history of successive waves of immigrants, Taos is a case study for the dynamic and perennial process of homemaking. Native People, Colonial Spanish, Anglo settlers, hippies, artists, healers and affluent baby boomers have shaped the built environments within this land of open space and majestic vistas. Taos' ancient geological land formations and numinous light ofter a context for and counterpoint to our transient residency.