Boonville vs Reality

This project started out as a document of small-town America. I realized, not so quickly, that my goal was impossible. I could not truly document these six different Boonvilles, not in the way I thought I wanted to. It's obvious, now that I think about it, but it was only two months ago that I was struggling to make this project into something that a photograph could never truly represent.


Geese flying South (maybe South-West), Boonville, New York, 2007

Because of my presence, regardless of the situation, I could never truly capture a scene as it was. Yes, I am creating a document, but it is flawed, mostly by that fact that I am there with a specific intention, to create something, therefore manipulating something. But there is more to it: The photograph itself is only an object; It is an object viewed and judged differently every time it is seen, therefore it separates itself farther from reality.

I first started thinking about Photography vs Reality when I read this passage in Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthe:

"Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ' posing,' I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image."

There has always been a level of fiction involved in my vision for the work (the idea is to take selected images from each town and juxtapose them together, creating a fictional "Boonville"), but it has always been based on real people, real stories and real moments.

After lots of discussions and thought, I realized that the journey to Boonville is the story, not Boonville itself. How could it be? I am manipulating every place I walk into; I'm causing a ripple in the normality of a situation: I'm on the cover of the papers, I'm hanging out at parties, etc.; The scene is automatically flawed. By excepting this, I am starting to create a document that represent something real: This journey.