Human, Error

• ¹ Vestiges
• ² Human, Error

I am given a map. 

No instructions, just a carefully folded photocopy of an approximation of a history. The plastic toner flakes off in spots that makes me question my assumption of indelibility.

On it is a legend, numbered 1 through 52. I count them to be sure I fully absorb the depth of my task.

Fifty-two points of interest, points of history. Fifty-two human imprints on the land outlined by this map. The constellation of points hazily forms a shape of the present tense, disguising as the past. Like stars in the night sky, I feel drawn to their mystery, wondering what makes each unique.

Drawn to the gap between what I imagine to find at these locations and the reality of what I would witness. My imagination, informed by how I know humans to have operated hundreds of years ago —  without such commercial speed. Fifty-two entanglements of the past and present that would only resolve if I made myself available to attend to each of them.

Georgia is largely unfamiliar to me. I have been to Atlanta and Savannah — I know some of their stories, as much as one can absorb stories as an occasional guest. The areas otherwise are complete blank spaces. Though, for the past two years, I have been immersed in the travels of William Bartram, finding inspiration in his history and the way he connected to the natural world through writing, documentation, and illustration. He spent four years observing the area’s biodiversity, native peoples’ customs, and their relationship with the land. Those active years were spent in Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia, where he vividly describing his present-day so that we may more clearly see the past. I read Bartram’s writings as a warning for the future.

See, I move through my world feeling lost, and I know I’m not alone. We’re failing each other in our implicit promise of continued existence. As stewards of the land, other species, and each other, we’ve lost our way.

I am given a map. A map, printed on paper. That paper is sourced from a tree, which once stood tall in a forest. That forest had an understory, teeming with life and curiosities that I can now never access. I have a map, its whisper of graphic data, and a willingness to observe land not as I want it to be, but as it presently is.

Route 47.

I circle around a pair of trucks many times before making a photograph. In this orbit, I can see that these are the sawed-off backs of two rusty American-made pickups, filled with life bursting upwards from the loamy, well-worked soil the beds contain. The scene feels like an intimate conversation between lives alien to me, using nouns and verbs that coo with an exotic quality.

Two dead objects, stuffed, in an attempt to breathe an existence back into them. Metallic taxidermy, optimistic as it is resourceful. I wonder about the earth beneath, what’s growing from these chrome gardens. What vegetables would be served after the harvest, and the lives of the people they’re served to.

The effort involved to keep life at our 21st-century minimum is breathtaking. Resources to capture resources, to convert them to more resources, all for what? Comfort? 

Dawn to dusk, cradle to grave — it seems a lot like palliative care.

I create workwhile I travel through unfamiliar areas of rural Georgia. As I wander, I have no cell reception or GPS, just this map. It turns out to be a gift, to be fully in the present, recording the area as I see it, plainly. The images I make share an attention to shape. The shape of beauty. The shape of a region. The shape of both determination and destruction. 

Route 22.

Here, the soft road undulates. Each downhill trip obscures the unknown of its return. It’s a coy game of hide and seek. I’m confounding that the road appears to be made of something pliable (as if a playful inquisitiveness), while the barren lands that surround me feel so concrete (as if final remarks.) Miles and miles of once-forested expanses, now flat as a blade, though blemished by an odd stump left behind, like punctuation marks in a sentence that seems to have no end. Defiant stumps, trying their best to slow things down enough to comprehend the unfolding story.

Children, playing hide and seek, until someone loses the game.

Bartram writes: “Continuing some time through these shady groves, the scene opens, and discloses to view the most magnificent forest I had ever seen. We rise gradually a sloping bank of twenty or thirty feet in elevation, and immediately entered this sublime forest; the ground is a perfectly level green plain, thinly planted by nature with the most stately forest trees, whose mighty trunks, seemingly of an equal height, appeared like superb columns…”

Where Bartram sees columns, I see a door. There is this modern capacity in us, of the wrong way seeming so right. A test of our resolve and whether we, as custodians of our planet, have faith that that door is not one-way.

Route 15.

I lose my breath. There’s so much beauty. It feels special to have an uninterrupted view of it. I travel far off the primary…or even secondary…roads, winding through ranches and farms. A wild shrub next to where I’m standing smells faintly of rosemary, and two bulbous bees dance in the still summer air. I’m unsure if I’m actively trespassing or just mistrustful of my faith in free access to the sublime. I realize I’m smiling. This place feels like deja vu.

You’ll soon hear Anna describe her family’s ongoing pursuit of recreating the sublime, not just for pleasing the senses, but because it matters. A complex, biodiverse landscape is  beautiful to witness, but more importantly it speaks to wise ecological decisions that are essential to survival. Their survival and ours.

Forested fields give way to produce farms give way to managed forests give way to chicken farms give way to solar fields. What then?

My travels bear witness to only one of this region’s stories. Pages describing a complex beauty. Pages singed at the edges by a smoldering urgency. With each detour and wrong turn, I begin to comprehend an all-too-familiar narrative: land that has been used and recycled many times. 

Time is in dialogue with place, thus shaping specificity in its landscapes, those which have been changed irrevocably, again and again, in our ravenous obsession with growth.  

Route 77.

The land is wild here. It grows more confident the farther I stray from the main road. Soil, and what emerges from it, confederated against me, delighting in my wrong turns and dead ends. What would happen if I weren’t here, experiencing this, meditating with the ghosts that embody our inhabited lands?

A flask of poison, a cat in a box, a superposition of eventualities. 

Rob spoke about being away from his family’s home for an extended amount of time — clear-cutting machines taking their positions during his absence. What about because of it?

Route 10.

Often, a photographer’s role is to tell a story. I have little interest in that as I travel through Georgia. I have no personal connection to this land, its people, its soul. I don’t believe it’s my story to tell. Instead, I am eager to use my camera to listen, as an interloper, capturing the present tense in the form I know best.

But I do have one minor story to tell. About me. About change. About a young man tending a local history museum who fielded my request for admission with “4 dollars, cash only.” I didn’t have 4 dollars, or any dollars, on me. I haven’t had a single note of currency in my wallet for years. So I turned around and left, defeated by a bill of goods I so eagerly bought into: advancement.

It’s a curious thing, the human concept of change. Some can’t get to tomorrow quickly enough. Some are consumed by yesterday. What magic happens in the space between the future and the past? The work I produce in the region is a reflection on a destabilizing feeling of being only there, only then, experiencing exactly one snapshot of time, knowing that countless other iterations have existed in the past.

An unknown number will take shape in the future.