Sunday, October 5, 2008

Tim Carpenter's A Most Serene Republic

Tim Carpenter e-mailed me today to share some images from his new series A Most Serene Republic, a body of work that explores the personal and collective histories of the American landscape. I'll let Carpenter's statement take it from here:

"I have often wondered in what way forgotten history abides, and what the consequences are of its being forgotten or brought to mind again. I have always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that pass through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and so are names. Universalism is beautiful, and so are particulars.

I didn't write the previous paragraph; Marilynne Robinson did, in her essay "A Great Amnesia." but I couldn’t possibly come up with a better way to express how I feel when I’m making photographs."











All photographs from the series A Most Serene Republic

All Images © Tim Carpenter