Under Land

I am drawn to borderlands and places on the edge, where environments overlap, and the landscape becomes unpredictable. Biologists use the word ecotone to denote an area where two adjacent ecosystems - for example, a forest and a marshland - overlap. Such a place has an ecology all its own, supporting a biodiversity of life not found in either of the adjoining ecosystems.

Culturally, visually and energetically, the ecotone works as a powerful metaphor for places where things happen that would not happen elsewhere. Cemeteries are consummate ecotones. They juxtapose the living and the dead into a single space, both above ground and under land, a microcosm that is somehow “other” - intense, contradictory and transformative, a place of distilled power.

I made the first images in this series in Cuba in January of 2012, but could not have foreseen what they would eventually become. Some projects need time to create themselves out of the artist’s subconscious mind, and I’ve learned it’s best to stay out of the way. Photographer Doug Beasley calls it “our vision being ahead of our ability to understand.”

It is only now, more than ten years later, that I have a sense of what I was after.

As a child, sudden death was a steady companion. I lost a beloved 63-year-old grandfather one year and my five-year-old sister the next, in 1968. In the wider world, it was the year of one shocking assassination after another: Martin Luther King in April, Bobby Kennedy in June. And each night a steady scroll of Vietnam casualties closed the TV news. By the time a boy I loved was shot and killed in 1971, I was an old hand at the rituals of death, and a regular at our town’s little graveyard in the woods. But I never really learned how to grieve.