Chromogenic Prints
30" x 30"
2004 & 2005

  THE BORDERLAND BOYS:

While living in Vilnius, Lithuania over three summers, I began photographing along small offshoots of the Neres River. I returned again and again to a handful of lakes, streams and swimming holes that compelled my curiosity as communal spaces of refuge dependent upon overgrown patches of nature in a haphazardly urbanizing city.

Even at the periphery of a highway, hospital, or waste-dump, to go barely into the Lithuanian forest is to enter another world gracefully, as though the previous hardly existed. Objects of contemporary life stand out like vestiges in the forest. A Coca-Cola waterslide hovers silently, beyond use, over a lake. Near an unmarked World War II cemetery men stand scattered throughout the woods amidst the swirling smoke of fire-grilled sausages on tin-foil grills. Russian trance music seeps out from portable speakers in sparsely replanted, single-species forests. Boys cluster, drunk at the crest of a hill.

Layered upon the relics of recent eras, and dusted with the remnants of contemporary culture, life--playful, intimate, communal, and celebratory-- enters into neglected, overgrown territory. Gesture articulates camaraderie, solitude, bravery, rest. These bordlerlands along the rivers muddle distinctions between the natural and constructed, private and public, play and ritual. Here the mundane and the monumental collide and mingle.

Though frequented mostly by a youthful cast, I was repeatedly drawn to landscapes near water for these seeming undertones of ritual, of community. As much of Eastern Europe's forest remains darkly weighted with a history of battle and loss, it astonished me how such terrains have been, by a young generation's casual inhabitation within them, swiftly re-envisioned as spaces of pleasure, commraderie and refuge.

These borderlands remain provocative terrains to me as the designation between public and private, places and their dwellers, are in continual states of collapse and reinvention.

The Borderland Boys project is an inquiry and celebration of contemporary wildernesses before they are known as such, before they are named--before they are maintained or made monuments of, before their potential and perhaps inevitable disappearance under the flora. Ultimately I hope to celebrate those who still find inventive ways to connect themselves with what's left of nature at the edge of the suburbs, at the border of the wild that we've dreamed of.