A series of 5 large-format images, taken in California, describing the founding myth of the USA.
Colonization processes, from the ancient journey of the Jewish people toward the land of Canaan to European migrations to the “new worlds” of America and Africa, would not have become reality without promise—a metaphysical offer of good fortune with an implicit command to act.
Accordingly, the notion of PROMISED LAND as trademark and imperative pervades the history of mankind’s departures and peregrinations throughout the millennia. The interplay between a superfluity of natural hardship, warlike devastation, and a paucity of agricultural and political resources is, in the promise, projected into a desideratum of bountiful supplies (“milk and honey”), natural resources (“Eldorado”), and an unfettered socio-economic, ideological, and political domain. Significantly, the old conditions— deprivation, violent conflicts, hostile natural surroundings—all too often become the new “companions” on the path to the new destination. The new reality “nibbles,” so to speak, at the dream of promise.
It may well be that the “onslaught” of the new reality, in its compensatory trade-off, first reveals an immanent but heretofore dormant trait of the promise: that of “insatiability,” which always ends in an “ever onward”… How else would it have been possible to cross the expanse of the North American continent to the “new shore” of the Pacific Ocean, subjugating it with hooves, plough, shovel, and rails?
In its absoluteness, this “utopian impulse” leaves behind the traces of hasty departures still visible nowadays in gold rush towns-cum-museums. By adhering to the homesteaders’ postulate of keeping government at bay, it also hinders through today the completion of “nation building” which, at best, is found in the precarious reality of small- cell social units.
In the photographic series titled PROMISED LAND, the evidence of this land grab marks the stages of a “fantastic geography,” stretching from its imaginary starting point in Point Reyes on the western end of California along the thirty-eighth parallel over San Francisco/North Beach to Bodie and Lake Topaz along the Nevada border.
Point Reyes differs from the other images in being a product of fortuitous, and later reworked, photographic processes, thereby transforming it into a visual substrate for “promise.” Thus Point Reyes serves as a metaphorical point of entry into the realia of the other photos, in other words, their pronouncements on the socio-economics of colonization: livestock—natural resources—farming— urbanization.
Presented in chronological sequence, the five photographs converge into a mythological re- narration, wherein the material texture of the analog film used resonates implicit historical and metaphysical levels, thus giving rise to autonomous images that transcend photographic representation.