Acts of God. Natural Disasters. Wildfires. Tornado Alley. The language used to describe natural disasters and their causes seeks to allocate blame on a vengeful deity, errant Nature, an even more errant human hand. Our choice of language strives to mitigate our loss of control by implying causality, hoping to soothe our newfound fears of forces once perceived as benign or as working in our favor. Yet, in truth, in looking at the ashen hills near San Diego, CA or the topsy-turvy yards of Utica, IL it becomes clear that blame is irrelevant. What is relevant, it seems to me, is the loss of control itself, the utter absence of reason. This is written in a physical language that exists for months and years after a wildfire, mudslide, tornado, hurricane, flood, or drought. For those who have lived through such a catastrophe, the charred trunk of a cedar, even surrounded by weeds and wildflowers, is a reminder of the worst, or perhaps just of the inevitable. How do we manage to live amidst the damage and uncertainty? We can point a finger or we can struggle to adjust to living with the unknown.
Falling at His Feet refers to a Jobian prostration or an Icarus-like fall--to fall at God's feet, in flames or in tears, not to ask for mercy but to recognize our vulnerability. I began this project many years ago with an initial photograph of a dry New Jersey reservoir and wondered how it would be to photograph in the wake of other natural disasters. It was several years before I actually acted on that impulse. Rather than some extreme version of ambulance chasing, I believe my drive to photograph the scarred landscape was a need to find a physical manifestation of our scarred psyches. We have, as I write in June of 2004, come to live with a threat to national security that grows both outside our country and within our own government. As a New Yorker who lived in the plume coming from Ground Zero, there was no photograph I could possibly make to describe the devastation. It was too immediate and too personal. To distance myself from it with the intervention of my camera was simply not possible. These landscapes of aftermath became an analogy for war, at home and currently, abroad.
