Artist’s statement
On a journey westward, she revealed her past: her father’s home, a railroad turntable, and secret corners of Yellowstone. I tried to show her how much I loved her. On our return, I proposed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Badlands came first. After hours on a blank highway, she agreed that we could detour toward strange outcroppings.
What began as a quick drive became an unexpected love story: one love unreturned, another just beginning. She said no. The land said yes.
It took years for me to let go of that “no,” but she left something more enduring: that first experience of the Badlands, and the opportunity to work out that happiness doesn’t depend on love being returned. Love lives in the act of loving—in love flowing from me. What remained after the rejection was not bitterness, but a changed way of seeing.
Each visit to the Badlands lifts me up, bodily and in the spirit. The Badlands stand at the intersection of wonder and bewilderment, where beauty and strangeness intensify one another. The land, as always, open, radiant, receptive.
These photographs approach the Badlands with the attentiveness reserved for the beloved: reading every ridge and shadow as evidence, poised between loss and solitary rapture, between longing and the boundless sky.