STATEMENTS
Alterations
"Alterations" explores the California front yard garden as a midcentury cultural phenomenon. Often considered a banal or mundane space, the front yard is also a cultural space, a container of history, an outward expression of aspirations and ideals.
While living in Northern California, Waters took daily walks encountering remnant forms of mid-century landscaping - shrubs and trees altered to fit the lines of a suburban built environment. The constant cutting of this plant life by homeowner-gardeners, landscaping contractors, and Latino day laborers, engaged in a perpetual struggle for the creation of order over verdant chaos, revealed a desire to domesticate nature, to bring order to landscapes where unkempt wildness might otherwise prevail.
"In witnessing myriad shrubs and trees being shaped to fit the lines of the urban environment I came to feel empathy for these living forms, the inherent inclination to grow wild, in unpredictable ways, here made to conform to a suburban order of concrete lines and neatness. I also came to observe a personal recognition, a metaphorical depiction, for how we may each allow ourselves to be shaped by the demands of urban living, the ways we are compelled to alter our own needs and compulsions to exist, or to contend with the homogenizing forces of labor, efficiency, and utility."
Portraits of Stumps
Taking nightly walks in suburban Northern California, I repeatedly encountered tree stumps protruding from neighborhood front yards and beside sidewalks. The labor and expense required to extract a tree stump is often excessive, so they remain in place, left to linger, as unintended memorials of past aspirations. Taking the time to photograph these stumps, to make visible their unique shapes, their presence in space, became an exercise in empathy, an expression of affinity with objects now disregarded.
Shape of Night
For five years I worked the night shift in Broadcast News in New York. I rarely saw the sun rise or set and experienced little daylight. I felt my senses changing, adapting to a nocturnal rhythm. Documenting my neighborhood at night allowed me to understand this experience of navigating the world at night.
Undocumented
In Brooklyn, New York, and other cities and towns throughout the USA, Latino workers begin each day at U-Haul and Home Depot parking lots, waiting to secure a couple of hours of paid construction or moving work.
These men are skilled laborers. They have travelled thousands of miles and endure daily discomfort and personal sacrifice in their search for a better life. Many send money home to support their families. Some have started new families in their adopted city. These men have no official status, papers, job security or health insurance. Each day begins anew. They arise and wait with hope that work will appear.
In this series, I attempt to document these workers, to make their presence felt, to depict the inherent strength and dignity of a group of individuals who exist within an economy of chance, making their living via random encounters. I’m also interested in interrogating the historical portrait, a formal depiction of individuals who remain mostly unseen.
Each worker was paid his requested hourly rate to sit for a portrait.
Shelf Life
Shelf Life explores the spatial and social landscape in and around that hallowed ground of American consumption, the Supermarket. The average North American supermarket is 40,000 square feet (12,100 m²), roughly the size of a football field or an acre of land. The commodified space we enter to partake in this final destination of industrial food production is designed to generate maximum ‘cart value’ or expenditure. The over-produced food products bear little resemblance to the land, labor, plant forms or animals from which they were extracted.
(Winner of the Svensk Bokkonst, Swedish Book Art Award 2021.)