THE LANDSCAPE

For years I drove by a local gravel yard and watched the landscape and horizon continually change. Enormous machines dug into the mountains, extracted boulders to be smashed into aggregate that would then be conveyed to create mounds and hills on the yard. This gravel would then be loaded onto enormous trucks and carted away, making room for the next miniature mountain range to be established. At times, this Sisyphean process went on 24 hours a day. I would photograph a fifty-foot gravel hill one day and the next it would be gone, replaced by one of a different configuration and form.

What interested me was the transformation of magnificent, live mountain ranges into miniature, dead replications. I was photographing erosive evolution at the speed of light, mountains disappearing in the night only to be replaced by artificial ones the next morning. What took four hundred million years to create was crushed in hours and reformulated to meet the ever-expanding appetite of humankind for reconstituted nature.