As a photographer, the West intimidated me when I first moved here. Everywhere I looked was a grand landscape. I often raised my camera to my eye as I drove or hiked through the mountains and high plains, only to lower it without releasing the shutter. What could I add to the legion of existing photographs that tell us of the grandeur of the West, the challenge, the uncomplicated beauty? It wasn’t until I began photographing with a Holga camera that I found a new vision.
Made in China, the Holga is all plastic. The ill-fitting back allows for light leaks and the plastic lens, not optically whole, creates dream-like, blurry images with varying areas of focus across the frame. The Holga isn’t cut out for the grand landscapes, but it led me to something else.
With Holga in hand, I began to see smaller, quieter parts of the West — ungrand moments, as it were; lonely graffiti off the main roads, cottonwoods seen up close, the quirky efforts of the people who live here to leave their mark, all quieter scenes that speak to an interior experience as much as an exterior one. Sometimes tack sharp photographs hold us at arm's length, I think, while less precise images invite us in. While we are tempted to think of a West as if it were one thing, there are many Wests, I think. And where grand landscapes create awe, the Holga showed me a landscape that is approachable, intimate, and for which I feel a familiarity and fondness.