Felicia, 2016
Alice, 1973
Chenin, 2020
Juli, 1999
Kathleen, 1976
Kerry, 1997
Betty, 1968
Laci, 2002
In this series, I photograph landscapes marked by violence: ordinary places permanently altered by tragedy. These are sites where victims of femicide were found; locations chosen for their anonymity and presumed ability to keep a story hidden. I return in the aftermath, documenting the quiet duration in which a place looks unchanged but is fundamentally transformed.
Each photograph is titled with a first name and year, a quiet insistence that returns personhood to a landscape that might otherwise read as neutral. If beauty provides respite from the horrors of the world, here that respite is denied. By placing the reality of horror within the frame of the scenic, I ask what it means to stay with the collision, to look without turning away, and to acknowledge how quickly violence can remain distant until it is not. Beauty becomes a threshold, an invitation that also functions as concealment. A riverbank can be luminous; a clearing can be calm. Yet the knowledge of what occurred there shifts the viewer from aesthetic comfort into moral attention.
I photograph from common vantage points: a roadside shoulder, turnout, gate, bridge, or overlook. These built boundaries shape what is seen and what is passed by. Distance, infrastructure, and the language of scenic beauty can turn a site into a blind spot, a space we move through without knowing. In returning, I ask what we permit to vanish within the open landscape.
The work traces a cultural permission to treat certain lives and places as expendable. These acts rely on the fantasy that land can absorb what we refuse to face: that the landscape can serve as refuge, scenery, and dumping ground. In Juli, 1999, an overlook holds papers detailing Juli’s story. Replaced anonymously whenever the text fades, these pages turn the site of her recovery into a threshold. Once read, the site is no longer the picturesque; aesthetic pleasure becomes a confrontation with the fragility of life. This act of communal care mirrors the series’ intent: to keep these stories present against the forces that soften, fade, and erase.
Refusing sensationalism, I ask what remembrance looks like when the landscape appears indifferent. Through the accumulation of these sites, I build a collective record, a sequence that refuses the bargain of looking away and acknowledges the cost of our silence.