Sunshine State

Sunshine State is a photographic series documenting the visual and cultural complexity of the contemporary Florida tourist landscape. Florida was admitted to the union in 1845, six years after the birth of photography. Throughout its history the state has been portrayed to the outside world through carefully constructed images. Many of the tourist attractions first marketed to mid-century American tourists (Weeki Wachee, Cypress Gardens, etc.) were man-made "improvements" on nature. Postcards sent home reflected this constructed ideal. A cycle of representation began that represented the state as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

My family moved to Florida when I was eleven. What I discovered is that the lived experience of growing up in paradise doesn't always look like it does on the postcards. I didn't wrestle alligators or cavort with mermaids. Though the origins of that ideal are never far away, on a given day it's more likely that you'll see a mural of a shark on the side of a building than actually run into one in real life. In this body of work, I am interested in examining how our knowledge and understanding of a place is constructed through the images that we see of it. My intent is to deconstruct the idyllic Florida traditionally represented and reconstruct a more accurate representation of the tourist landscape, a place where residents and tourists coexist and everyone lives with the land.

You Are Here

'If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which can not be defined as relational or historical or concerned with identity will be a non-place' -Marc Auge

You Are Here is a photographic representation of the transitional spaces associated with travel; the ambiguous 'non-places' that modern travelers pass through en masse on their way to somplace else. These non-places include airports, highways, truck stops, train stations, motels, restaurants, etc, and are intended as temporary spaces for passage. Though these are places in which modern travelers spend increasing amounts of time, they often go unrepresented in traditional photographic travel narratives. How do these places serve to simultaneously disrupt and reinforce our sense of place in the world? How do we, as individuals, exist within and interact with, spaces built for, and often defined by, ideas of mass transit?

Citra

My intent in this body of work is to examince a particular place of transit and investigate how it can exist simultaneously within our society's definitions of both place and non-place. My interest in documenting this particular location is personal.

As a child, The Orange Shop, a souvenir shop/orange grove on highway 301 in Citra, Florida was one of my family's pit stops on our yearly trek from our home in New England to our summer vacation on the Gulf Coast of Florida. We would sample juice and use the restrooms and be on our way. After we moved to Florida, I forgot about the place until a road trip twenty years later brought me up 301 and I began to recall those fleeting stops years earlier. While my family had stayed for five minutes, once a year, there were workers and townspeople for whom the Orange Shop was a part of their daily lives; a place that could be considered relational, historical and concerned with identity.

These photographs were made on a freezing January morning, as far removed from the tropical ideal associated with Florida as one can imagine. Granted access to areas of the shop and warehouse I'd never experienced as an ordinary traveller, I was able to create a body of work that represents the tourist site from a less common perspective...one that attempts to find the line between place and non-place; the grey area between home and away.