andrea calo

Through spending most of my life in Arizona, I have seen changes in the landscape as Phoenix grows outward and less and less unfenced desert remains. There have been many photographers who have commented and criticized this trend in the American Southwest. However, I am less interested in placing blame or finger pointing when it comes to misuse of land, and more interested in exploring our connection to place through metaphor. I believe the relationship of man to land (or vice a versa) is complex: we seem significant, yet we are not merely here to fulfill some manifest destiny. In this sense, photography has allowed me a way to learn and understand the landscape through metaphor.

I am interested in the cycles of life that exist in nature seemingly without regard to one's perception of time. Exploration of tracks, bones, and traces of life has led way to a broader understanding of the evanescence of the Southwest. Life has not always existed; life will not always exist. The land is a setting for birth, growth, and death, with and without the participation of man. In viewing the bones and remains of other creatures, we may begin to realize our own mortality, as well as the bigger picture of our place within and outside this process.

Visually, I am concerned with creating images that communicate these ideas metaphorically. The tonal qualities of the prints are transformed into symbols of life, death, and the immanent rotations of these cycles. These manifestations are a presence in the photograph that becomes more than the actual scene. It is in this manner that the method of creating the photograph and the transformation of the scene into print mimics the process of life that is represented.

From studying this manner of existence and the reality of the earth's own rotations of new life, evolution, mortality, degeneration, healing; these cycles appear to be incomprehensible to man. I believe in these cases, the world persists in a paradoxical manner; the palpitations of life and death appear transient. As if man, when viewed from the point of the world, is inconsequential: merely one element in a periodic table of time and players in the landscape.