Thoughts On My Recent Photo Work – Landscape / Still Life / Architecture Merged

John Dean       1- 2009

In my most current work I have made use of a framework of photo still-life that alludes to mutations of architecture, the interrelationships of personal and public space, and my reflections on the changing American landscape. Generally working with small tabletop sets, I’ve become more interested in transitional morphologies and floating environments than depicting actual specific objects and times.

All of my work describes the contemporary landscape in one form or another. For me, picturing the man-made landscape simply refers to looking at the dynamic condition of how we shape the contours and symbols of the terrain that we've inherited. It also reflects how the powers of the natural world and global change affect our ability to reframe that landscape in our own image. Whether these photographs are taken in the real world or the still-life world, or a combination of two, my interests are more subconscious than literal descriptions. What we build is delicate, temporary, mysterious, and vulnerable in the face of greater forces at work behind the sculpted facade.

As the entire world becomes more tightly interdependent, in regard resources exploited, climate linked, and information shared, the demarcations between the personal, the public, and the"natural" space begin to narrow and blur. In the end, it becomes one seamless planet with one shared history. The monuments and markers we build today are as ephemeral as the shifting weather that will ultimately shape the fleeting memory of them.