- Project Statement -

Incendiary Iconography:The Legacy of the Cold War in America is an ongoing documentary photography project in images and text addressing Cold War-era military sites in the United States that are in the process of public reclamation and/or transformation under the Defense Environmental Restoration Program. As a photographer, I seek to record and interpret aspects of our society that I think warrant our attention, understanding, and memory.

I attempt to elaborate the weft of bureaucratic reasoning revealed in these rationalized utilitarian spaces, and the weave of local populations and their personal experiences of making a "normal" life in the shadow of them. A confluence of forces shaped both the physical quality of these places and the worldview that required them, mirroring both the ingenuity and the excess of American society in the twentieth century. Their functions, history, organization, and legacies should be of concern to all citizens in order to safeguard the quality of life in our democratic society.

Photographs are gelatin-silver prints on double-weight fiber paper, processed with care to archival standards, selenium toned, and mounted and over-matted on museum board. A few but growing number of images in the series are color type C prints, printed on Fuji Crystal Archive RA-4 paper. Exhibition images are framed, typically at 16”x20”, and ready for installation.