We All reflect All
We All reflect All
2013-2015
The unprecedented flooding along Colorado's Front Range in September 2013 has been described as a thousand-year event. The devastation was enormous, and thousands of people were affected, from flooded basements to houses literally washed away in the torrent. While the destruction has been well-documented by photojournalists and artists alike, my own response to the flood was out of an abiding concern for a particular canyon I have been photographing for nearly two decades.
During the year following the flood, I began to find small objects embedded within the newly-formed walls of detritus, seen everywhere along the scoured creek bed. A single lens from a long-gone pair of eyeglasses, a tennis ball curiously sawn in half, a bent garden spade, and a leaky ice cube tray were just some of the objects that had taken a journey on the flood’s wild water and landed upturned and mud-encrusted miles from home.
What each object has in common is that they are all vessels of a sort. Carefully filling them with water, I began a series of photographic experiments to see if I could record the reflection of starlight upon the water’s surface. If, as Carl Sagan famously said, we are all starstuff, then perhaps there is a kind of cosmological solidarity to be found in such an exercise, reflecting what is so much greater than us via broken vessels that embody an intrinsic part of who and what we are. To reflect the night sky within these small and ordinary objects is to suggest a larger kind of possibility: that we are all connected, and that we all reflect loss and hope in much the same way.