Room 3: The Urban West

Prior to visiting New York City in 1995, my approach to urban photography was an adaptation of my approach to landscape photography. Indeed, the shape of urban spaces in the American West owes much to the intertpenetration of landforms and natural vegetation with the human built environment. Humans can neither escape nor permanently subdue the non-human world, but this does not stop many humans from ignoring the extent to which they remain embedded in the context of the "natural" world (as demonstrated by the East Bay Hills photograph below, taken just over a year and a half after the devastating Oakland conflagration of 1991).

East Bay Hills, Berkeley-Oakland, California, March 1993.

African-American neighborhood on fringes of downtown Houston, Texas, June 1992.

Clearing fog and Eugene, Oregon from Spencer's Butte, January 1994.

Downtown and Mt. Hood from Rose Garden, Portland, Oregon, June 1996.

Henry Weinhard's Brewery, Portland, Oregon, June 1996. I have fond memories from college of buying mass quantities of Henry's at Costco. Too bad they were bought out by Coors.

Skylight, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 1995.

The Portland Building with statue of Portlandia, Portland, Oregon, 1994.

America's middle classes have really been digging in the last decade or so, as exemplified by this gated community. Discovery Bay, California, August 1994.

Clearing storm over San Francisco, California, December 1993.

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