URBAN PALEONTOLONY
Years ago, my brother, who was an amateur paleontologist, showed me dinosaur bones that he had dug out of rock uplifts, creek beds, and simple mounds of earth in western South Dakota. As I held these artifacts of another time, I felt a sense of the sacred in their existence. I also felt the impermanence of lives, especially after he showed me a photo of the K-T boundary, the line that was formed when a giant asteroid hit the earth in an area now known as the Gulf of Mexico. The collision cast a thin layer of iridium over the earth. Below that line, dinosaurs lived; above that line no bones of them have been found.
Several years ago, I began to realize that urban spaces are often like paleontology sites insofar as they contain remnants of the past left by weather and human mark makers. I began to see beyond the surface appearance of the shapes, lines, and colors of the marks and make photos that reimagined them as abstract expressions. While for many, these processed photos might not have the impact of an actual high mountain range or expanse of a prairie stretching into the far-off horizon, but to the extent that the images exist, they are creations and as such are sacred, as all things are sacred.
I share selected images from my Urban Paleontology project along with the comment that I have been hit an asteroid of sorts. Age limits but does not prevent one from creating. Each photo began with seeing a human made material: concrete, a wall surface, and such and then was transformed in the digital darkroom.
