As a photographer I have been shooting urban settings almost entirely for the last ten or twelve years. All of my images involve taking multiple photographs of a scene and then stitching them together into files that can sustain very large format prints. My process also allows me to stretch out the time captured in my prints, because at a minimum it takes me thirty to sixty minutes to shoot the individual photographs that are included in the final image, and often I return to a scene days, weeks, or even a year later.
By the end of 2019, however, forcing everything into one final print, felt both constraining–there was still a before and after crucial to the context and content of my work, and static–despite the immersive quality of my prints, I wanted to further enliven them with movement and motion. In addition to this artistic tension was the almost unavoidable political and cultural churning, and then in February, 2020, Covid-19 was added to the mix.
During January, 2020, I started taking photographs in the Jordan Homestead, a Frenchman Bay Conservancy preserve in Ellsworth, Maine. By March, the stills morphed into videos, and over the next six months, I shot and worked these videos into, Sanctuary, a thirty minute film that reflects my experience of the place, which became a zone of refuge, and the project, an antidote and repudiation of the destructive currents swirling about us.
Sanctuary was filmed at the Jordan Homestead in Ellsworth, Maine, a 31 acre preserve of the Frenchman Bay Conservancy.
Sanctuary is a 4K UHD video (3840 by 2160 pixels). This website has a maximum width of 1000 pixels, so if you watch the video here, the resolution will be 1000 by 562 pixels. However, if you use this link, Sanctuary,
Alternatively, you can click on the full screen icon in the bottom right corner of the Vimeo screen (to the left of the word vimeo) and you will go into full screen mode.