REVEALING TERRITORY

This work began when I moved to Arizona in early 1982, and it continued until 2004, around the time Polaroid's Type 55 film was removed from the market. Initially the series owed its look to the photographs I'd been making of home and friends in Idaho, but the photographs became more focused on the landscapes of the Southwest and the history of issues related to human interaction with the land there.

I printed these photographs onto 16×20-inch black-and-white photo paper called Kodak Koda-bromine E3. The paper had a matte surface and was not something normally used for landscape photographs. The paper accentuated the middle gray tones of the image, and its surface and tonality were qualities I loved about the material. It seemed to fit the Polaroid film's tonal range very well, and I liked that it cut across the more dramatic traditions of the genre. Later, when the Kodak paper was discontinued, I printed on another matte paper made by liford.

I printed all of the image, including the ragged edges of the film that were the result of a paper mask that separated the Polaroid negative from its instant print during development. Normally these edges would have been cropped out during enlargement of the image. But I liked how they resembled and seemed to refer to the mottled edges of wet plate collodion negatives made by the survey photographers of the nineteenth century. The film's edges also brought attention back to the surface of the print. This was a way to acknowledge that the photograph was not a faithful representation of the land, but an artifact of process and vision.

The photographs in the series have titles written by hand in silver ink on the print surface. This began with the photographs I made in Idaho, and I first thought of it as a reference to the way nineteenth-century photographers wrote numbers or sometimes titles onto their negatives. But a reference to the snapshot was just as important, particularly to family albums from the early twentieth century, when it was common to neatly scrawl personal notations across images.

The book Revealing Territory came out in 1992 and reproduced a selection of the work finished about halfway through the series. Other books also drew on this work, including Traces of Eden (1986) and Desert Legends (1994). When this series began I thought I was starting a lifelong project. It was certainly the main focus of my practice for more than twenty years, and I made thousands of images for the series. But by the mid-1990s I started to reach a point of diminishing returns for the effort it was taking to continue the work, and I felt a need to refresh my roots in landscape photography. This contributed to a decision to return to rephotography with the Third View project. By 2004 Polaroid Type 55 was near the end of its production life, and the film was harder to obtain and less technically reliable. I ended this series at that time.