New Roll / What Will The American Collapse Look Like? (Patreon)

Hi! Here's the photos visible here on Flickr, and here in a zipped folder on my Drive. 

This roll is "Fuji" 400 shot on my Nikon N60, which has quickly become my new dry-weather go-to setup.

I want to portray what it feels like to live in a moment where I am intentionally seeking beauty in the world to ground myself...

...while at the same time showing the undercurrent of fear that America is collapsing into a much more militant and violent form of authoritarianism. What does that look like?

(Not this shot above, right? This seems cheery.)

(Maybe this? These are the same roll, though.)Photography, at its core, is a visual representation intersection of two things: the culture that the photographer lives in, and the photographer herself.

This intersection is most apparent in my recent style of photography. I walk around and simply observe the world that exists around my home, and I often fixate on things that have long interested me, like cars. It's true even for my books, though, which are very intentionally curated imagery.

We Deserve This, for example, is reflective of the society I live in: it uses the visions of wealth, style, and success that American car culture created. I brought my personal lens to it by applying that culturally-created imagery to my community; the intersection imagines a world in which trans women had access to those images—those lives—all the time.

The importance of the personal lens vs. the overarching culture is debatable; very little art has actually meaningfully changed the cultures that it co-opts or opposes or critiques.

Still, it's worth acknowledging that the artist's beliefs shape the art intensely; the Starship Troopers of Heinlein and of Verhoeven portray the same society and the same conflict, but they are violently opposed in what they have to say about that society.

To answer the original question: Americans will not all wake up one day and decide unanimously that the experiment is finished; it will be slow, drawn-out, painful for various groups at various times, and it's unlikely we all admit it at the same time. It may not happen at all for another hundred years. It may have already happened, although that will only be apparent in the postmortem analysis.

So all I can be certain of are two things: I am holding the camera, and I am pretty goddamn worried about what happens next but I'm trying to not let it stop me from living.

This is what documenting the intersection of my life and America's collapse would look like. I just wake up every day hoping these only end up being photos of Seattle taken by a very anxious woman, and nothing more.

Vicki