I began to photograph Darwin after living here for a few years, first as an outsider, later as a participant in the community.
Darwin's evidence as a desert mining town is everywhere: old shacks and storefronts; trailers and wrecked cars; ore cars and junk. The photographs of this idiosyncratic Mojave outpost are a narrative that tells of the interplay between the people who live where the end of the road meets the wilderness, and their assimilation with that topography. The people and their creations both accommodate and celebrate the isolating vastness of their home. By delimitating, framing, personalizing, and reducing this space to a manageable scale, they co-opt, and ultimately, co-exist with it.
The photographs explore the absurd juxtapositions as well as the often beautiful eclectic monuments, artworks, mining detritus, and enigmatic objet d'art created that intersect with and humanize this landscape, while contradicting and mitigating the sublime expanse of it.
In Darwin, the limitless landscape, human presence and history intersect. These photographs are an exploration of the idea of isolation: how physical remoteness informs the space that people inhabit—while conversely, human activity; historical remnants; the individuals, and the constructs that they create define the character of a place.
