Strip Cuts
I attended Graduate School in the Photography MFA Program at Ohio, University in Athens, Ohio from September 1975 through June 1977. I moved to Athens after spending 5 years living, learning, and working in the Chicago area. I completed an undergraduate degree at Northwestern University, worked in construction, photography, and various part-time jobs. I spent time as a cab driver and worked as a secretary/receptionist for a small machine tool supply firm. I lived a very urban existence. I photographed extensively throughout this time basically doing what I would describe as urban street photography. Then I moved to the country.
Athens is in southeastern Ohio in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It is set in lush forests and rolling hills. It is a very rural area. For many years much of the economy revolved around mining coal. When I arrived there, the scars from that industry were still relatively fresh—I’ve not returned there since graduation so I can’t speak to how the past 40 odd years have changed the landscape. When I was there, one did not have to look far to find the abandoned and largely un-reclaimed strip mines.
I’m not sure why I was initially drawn to these disruptions in the beauty of the land. Honestly, living outside of an urban environment for the first time in my life I was unsure just what to point the camera at. Graduate School was a time of discovery and questioning. It was not until spring of my first year in Athens that I began photographing in the Strip Cuts—places where huge machines had dug and moved and fundamentally changed the landscape. At the time, the images I was most interested in were quite abstract views of these environs—coming in close, using the camera to tightly crop shapes, bending the content to my will through aggressive printing techniques. However, over the course of several months, I also made many photographs that looked at these landscapes from a more reflective point of view—documenting what was there and letting the visual chaos and cacophony of the sites speak directly to the viewer.
Now, over 40 years since making these images, I have revisited them and found a whole new experience and body of work awaiting me. The abstractions are still there, but it’s the more contemplative images that most interest me. Negatives I never printed then are now the images most worthy of my attention.
Athens is in southeastern Ohio in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It is set in lush forests and rolling hills. It is a very rural area. For many years much of the economy revolved around mining coal. When I arrived there, the scars from that industry were still relatively fresh—I’ve not returned there since graduation so I can’t speak to how the past 40 odd years have changed the landscape. When I was there, one did not have to look far to find the abandoned and largely un-reclaimed strip mines.
I’m not sure why I was initially drawn to these disruptions in the beauty of the land. Honestly, living outside of an urban environment for the first time in my life I was unsure just what to point the camera at. Graduate School was a time of discovery and questioning. It was not until spring of my first year in Athens that I began photographing in the Strip Cuts—places where huge machines had dug and moved and fundamentally changed the landscape. At the time, the images I was most interested in were quite abstract views of these environs—coming in close, using the camera to tightly crop shapes, bending the content to my will through aggressive printing techniques. However, over the course of several months, I also made many photographs that looked at these landscapes from a more reflective point of view—documenting what was there and letting the visual chaos and cacophony of the sites speak directly to the viewer.
Now, over 40 years since making these images, I have revisited them and found a whole new experience and body of work awaiting me. The abstractions are still there, but it’s the more contemplative images that most interest me. Negatives I never printed then are now the images most worthy of my attention.