Another Level

While scouting this location I found myself thinking about how much Finding Estrella has changed since I first started photographing the desert mountain near me.

In the beginning, I thought I was making a project about a mountain. The goal was simply to find and photograph the remaining views before they disappeared.

As I prepared to photograph yet another construction site rising in front of the horizon, it struck me that the same thing is happening throughout much of the American West. The details change from city to city, but the pattern remains surprisingly familiar. Warehouses and data centers continue to reshape places that once felt defined by open space and distance. As development expands, the visual experience of the West changes with it.

The mythology of the West has always been tied to the horizon. The idea that there was always something beyond the next stretch of desert, just over the horizon. As the landscape changes, that mythology begins to fade with it.

I still feel Finding Estrella is about a mountain; I just think it’s about more than one mountain now.