The keys to my first car were a means of escape. I was free to drive to the ends of the earth, to be alone in nature. This need to be isolated in nature seemed a primal instinct. Since my late teens, I have been taking solitary road trips, seeking to lose myself along back roads, and finding comfort in the ability to find myself lost. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods any time,” wrote Thoreau, “…and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, - for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,-do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.”
For the series Rooted, I made images using the wet collodion process, a nineteenth century process that requires the image be exposed and developed on site. The collodion process renders light slowly, and reveals the passing of time. I took to the road with my 8x10 camera and a portable darkroom in search of familiarity in the unfamiliar landscape of rural America. I traveled from east to west, in the spirit of the original landscape photographers of the American west, but as a contemporary woman, with a vehicle, in the much impacted landscape of modern times. Each photograph engages the viewer in a dialogue between the equal and opposite elements in nature. The title Rooted is, in itself, a paradox. My pilgrimage uproots me, but I find myself grounded in the familiar strangeness of nature.