it’s not about the land
I’ve been working on it’s not about the land for ten years, on location in Arizona alongside families of the San Carlos Apache community. The project began with a question about land – who holds it, who took it, who is still living with what happened – and it has stayed there ever since.
The Apaches survived the violence of Manifest Destiny, when American settlers expanded westward bringing disease and the forced removal of Native people. That history isn’t context for this work; it shapes how the present is lived. The San Carlos Reservation was created in 1872 as a place to consolidate the Apache tribes the U.S. government wanted out of the way – a barren stretch of land the people held there came to call Hell’s Forty Acres. Geronimo was one of them. Nearby, in the cliffs above Superior, is a place called Apache Leap. I was told that Apache families jumped to their deaths when the U.S. military surrounded their hiding place, rather than surrender. The community I photograph carries all of it – culture, family, tradition – kept alive on a landscape full of ghosts.
I’m an outsider here, and I try to make work that knows it. There’s no single story I’m trying to tell, no clean argument about victims or villains. The myths people tell about this place – settler myths, government myths, the community’s own – contradict each other constantly, and I’m more interested in sitting with that contradiction than resolving it.
The work is made with large and medium format film, video, and installations that bring pieces of the desert itself into the gallery — dust, remnants, fragments of the place. Slow work. Collaborative. Always returning.
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