David Kutz

Project Statement: Photographs can transport you to a place or an event that you would not have experienced otherwise. These few pictures are a small sampling of what I have seen of our world. ".... Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves... There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view…." Michel de Montaigne as quoted in “The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics". Book by JB Jackson, p. 4, 1980

I am fascinated by the cultural landscape, the place where people and nature interact. What is built, preserved or allowed to decay tells us a lot about what we value. For me, the vernacular landscape – the everyday cultural landscape – speaks softly, but clearly, about who we are and what we think is important. At one point, I thought that representations of the cultural landscape without people made a stronger statement about our social condition than any portrait. There is some truth to this, but as I continued to work, people began to appear in my pictures as markers of time. Photographs, maps or other representations reflect our values at a particular time. By using multiple exposures that results in repeating images of people moving through the landscape, I extend that moment, albeit briefly. The period of time seen in my work is not a corollary to the pace of cultural change, but it does allow the viewer to contemplate that things change. I am very aware of the fact that we now live in the Anthropocene, an epoch where humanity is directly affecting nature on an unprecedented global scale. My work shows how we live in places and non-places affected by globalization and/or how we are responding to a warming planet.