DESCRIPTION
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.
AUTHOR
As a photographer and as an artist making photos for nearly 50 years, Marcia documents both the compelling interplay of the natural landscape transformed by a poignant and often ironic human presence, and the constructed landscape transfigured by the natural—meticulously cultivated or persistently accidental.
She splits her time between Orange County and Darwin, California, an old mining town on the outskirts of Death Valley, California, miles from anywhere but home to her.
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Education
California State University, Fullerton, CA
• Major in photography; Master of Arts degree
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA
• Major in photography; Bachelor of Fine Arts degree
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Exhibitions
• Photograph of the year 2020, The New Topographic Movement (Facebook)
• The American Landscape, The Garner Center for Photographic Exhibitions, Waltham, MA
• Editor’s Applause, Frames Magazine
• Fine Art Photography Awards
• Neutral Density Photography Awards
• newlandscapephotography.com
• Women in Photography International, travelling exhibition
• Artists at Angels Gate, San Pedro, CA
• LACPS Members Exhibition, Los Angeles, CA
• Paradox (solo exhibition), CSU Fullerton, CA
• American Color, New Mexico State University, travelling exhibition
• Contemporary Photographic Thinking, Chapman College, Orange, CA
