"Rocket Science"
In 2004 I began photographing the Cold War era rocket ship playgrounds located throughout the United States, never imagining that 20 years later we would be on the cusp of entering a new nuclear arms race and that the threat of this force throughout the world was gaining momentum. At first I was captivated by these monuments of science which are from a time period when the United States was simultaneously grappling with it’s atomic inheritance from the creation and use of the atom bomb while attempting be the first country to land on the moon. Standing as artifacts of escapism and control bound to a collective Utopian ideology, the structural vestiges spanning the American technological and recreational sublime, were originally mass produced and installed on both public and private property in rural, suburban, and metropolitan communities throughout the 50 states in the mid 20th century.
I knew that they were being torn down and wanted to make a record of their remaining environments in same way that one gathers a collection of historical artifacts from which to learn from where we have come as a civilization. I wanted to make a visual history of what I thought was a vanishing object associated with both war and the exploration of space. As I began slowly criss-crossing the country in my car documenting the structures before they’d disappear I questioned what our dreams, hopes, and fears were from what was the Cold War period. Over the course of 4 presidential administrations a cyclical paradigm began to emerge along with the visual typology I’d created with my 8 x 10" view camera and film with the project evolving on a daily basis paralleling the current threat of nuclear force rising once again on a global scale.
The rockets that are still in existence lie dormant in the landscape yet their ideology is reawakening.
In 2004 I began photographing the Cold War era rocket ship playgrounds located throughout the United States, never imagining that 20 years later we would be on the cusp of entering a new nuclear arms race and that the threat of this force throughout the world was gaining momentum. At first I was captivated by these monuments of science which are from a time period when the United States was simultaneously grappling with it’s atomic inheritance from the creation and use of the atom bomb while attempting be the first country to land on the moon. Standing as artifacts of escapism and control bound to a collective Utopian ideology, the structural vestiges spanning the American technological and recreational sublime, were originally mass produced and installed on both public and private property in rural, suburban, and metropolitan communities throughout the 50 states in the mid 20th century.
I knew that they were being torn down and wanted to make a record of their remaining environments in same way that one gathers a collection of historical artifacts from which to learn from where we have come as a civilization. I wanted to make a visual history of what I thought was a vanishing object associated with both war and the exploration of space. As I began slowly criss-crossing the country in my car documenting the structures before they’d disappear I questioned what our dreams, hopes, and fears were from what was the Cold War period. Over the course of 4 presidential administrations a cyclical paradigm began to emerge along with the visual typology I’d created with my 8 x 10" view camera and film with the project evolving on a daily basis paralleling the current threat of nuclear force rising once again on a global scale.
The rockets that are still in existence lie dormant in the landscape yet their ideology is reawakening.
