​​​​​​​Susan Evans Grove

"...We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired..." Wendell Berry

​

I was thinking about this Wendell Berry quote and Thomas Cole's prescient concern for the future of the American landscape when we sailed up the Hudson River to Catskill, N.Y. in the summer of 2023. It is still easy enough to imagine what Cole saw on his early sketching trips up the Hudson. It is also easy to see signs of the industrialism and its environmentally catastrophic effects that he knew would come for to beloved Hudson Valley. The center of these images reflect the style of photography in Cole's time where the edges employ a process I used in an earlier body of work called Suburban Sprawl to illustrate the effects of human toxicity on the landscape.