All of these photographs were taken within Pittsburgh; most of them are not far from busy thoroughfares or residential areas. Despite their proximity to habitation, what typifies each location is that it exists in an apparent no-man's-land; a gap or void in the built fabric of the city.
There is a certain looseness in these spaces. They are not all tied up and under control, with neatly mown lawns, hemmed in by plastic edging clipped together to tell you where you can walk: on the path, thank you, and what you can look at: our picture-perfect lawn. In these edge-places, everything is dynamic, mutable and conditional. These are areas of overlap between the “human system” and the “nature system”. They are in transition, usually from some kind of ordered use to something more contingent, open-ended and subject to interpretation.
These gaps are the product of the city's ebb and flow. Carved out of the woods, they were colonized, farmed, and developed; moved around for the extraction of materials or for easier access, and then they slid into dereliction, fell down or were razed, and their history forgotten. In that which remained, seeds blown in or deposited by birds germinate in the compost of un-cleared leaves and nature takes over by degrees. Thus is a new kind of Wilderness created. Step over the frontier of societal control, through the break in the fence or between the billboards, and see what the fluttering arboreal veil conceals. Steep slopes covered in trees and strangled in vines make good hiding places, and it is into this unregulated territory that the misfits, the restless, and the semi-lawless come to follow their own needs and desires.
In the same way that in the mid-nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau acted upon his need to simplify his existence by taking to the woods near Concord, so today do some self-directed souls take to the tree-filled places around Pittsburgh. To be sure, there are those who have no other option than to find refuge in un-regarded corners; however, I've come upon deliberately arranged places that speak more to Thoreau's two-year project “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…” living as he chose, avoiding the cramping strictures of society.
It is still so that in tree-filled, weedy gaps, although now the sound of traffic is ever-present, there is seldom anyone around to break the pattern of thought. Nature, or whatever it is that is growing there, is going about its own processes and a person can observe the workings of his or her own mind for a more sustained period than is possible where time and the environment are divided up into portions.
I am not that interested in photographing people because there is little mystery in seeing someone engaged in an activity. It explains itself: it fills up the space, leaving little room for poetic or philosophical consideration. However, I am very interested in the human trace, evidence of interactions with the space of a particular area, because it allows me to think existentially about how we know where we are, and how we situate ourselves in the world.
One such place that for me is both “empty” and redolent of the human trace is an area of about 22 acres that once contained a small settlement, called Seldom Seen. Its name says it all; it is an odd and vaguely unsettling place. Tucked away behind a railway line, it covers a swathe of rambling hillside between a major road and the neighborhoods over the hilltop, and through it runs a creek with the inevitable smell of a sewage outfall. Although nominally a public space, very little is provided to make it accessible, beyond a small parking area beside a salt dome. A graveled path takes you under an amazing brick railway arch, but once inside, the laid walkway gives out and all bets are off; you proceed at your own risk.
Despite its lack of visibility, a lot of people seem to know about this place. Quiet during the week, on weekends there is a surprising amount of activity, mostly of the rock-smashing and rolling-big-things-down-the-slope-into-the-creek variety. It took a few visits for me to realize that the stream looped around a large buried midden that, apart from a bridge abutment and a cellar hole or two, is the only discernable remnant of habitation. Blackened layers visible in the bank show that people have been dumping their trash here for quite a long time and a number of bottle collectors know it. Just under ground level, at the top of the cliff-face, are compacted bands of congealed asphalt shingles. Halfway down is thicker layer studded with household refuse that dates from the first part of the last century, when around 20 families lived in the hollow.
The bottlers dig in at this level in the hope of finding something interesting and unbroken, running the constant risk of the overhanging freight of earth and trash with its crown of Japanese Knotweed, fall in on them. They push the spoil away behind them where it rolls down to the creek; I think about a winter of rain, washing the soil away, leaving the solid fragments to accumulate on the creek bed. A new geological stratum, a ribbon of china and rusted metal in a matrix of gravel and sand, ready for discovery by some other hopeful prospector, sometime in the future.In his philosophical analysis, Thoreau identified four necessities for human existence: Food, Shelter, Clothing and Fuel. These he further reduced to two: Shelter and Clothing being varieties of the same, whose function is to “retain our own internal heat”, and Food and Fuel, both of which serve to keep “the fire within us.” He determined that all other comforts only provided more of either category and were therefore superfluous, if not to say overly luxurious. My philosophy is not as Spartan as Thoreau's. To my way of thinking, at base we are motivated by two imperatives: the need to identify or create Place and the need to cultivate in order to sustain ourselves. Hence the title of this show: Homes & Gardens.