Past & Present

Past & Present is a series of photographs contrasting the historic structures of indigenous peoples with those of contemporary America. My intention is to explore the way in which historic indigenous communities built their cities out of natural materials and lived close to nature while modern-day American cities are disassociated from their environments. Visiting ruins across the Four Corners states pre-pandemic, I emphasized the stark utilitarian nature of pueblos and kivas of the Hopi, the Navajo, and the Sinagua peoples by photographing the buildings in black and white. I looked for analogous structures in contemporary cities, photographing them in color to highlight the artificiality of their building materials. Loosely inspired by the collaborative works of “then and now” photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, I placed the images side by side to visually demonstrate the formal and visual similarities within disparate locations and structures.