100 Eyes Magazine The American Dream

Echoes from the Cold War

The Cold War was one of the most significant and revealing periods in the history of our species. From a current perspective, the arms race can appear apocalyptically surreal and suicidally paranoid. The technological progression from bomber to missile, from high yield warheads to smaller ones, from inaccurate to accurate missiles all had their consequences for strategy. Massive retaliation gave way to precise counter-force targeting, and in turn to missile defense. Since the development of nuclear weapons in World War II, humankind has struggled with the meaning of security and with the unprecedented possibility of ending the very civilization which enabled the building of The Bomb in the first place. Early in the Cold War the U.S. found itself relying heavily on its nuclear forces to counterbalance the Soviet superiority in conventional weapons. Ironically, our conventional forces have become so far superior to that of contemporary Russia that they have begun a major program of upgrading their nuclear forces to counterbalance our conventional edge. Will another nuclear arms race such as that chillingly depicted here repeat itself in the new century? Will the comparatively minor threat of global terror be supplanted by another round of truly apocalyptic possibilities?

You will not find a single human figure in my work, but it is nonetheless very much about the human condition — our fears, our dreams, our history, our creativity. Each series of my photographs is motivated by various crosscurrents of these concerns. Post-structuralist thinkers would have us believe that images have no meaning except as seen through the lens of a particular culture, but this seems unlikely to be completely true since, going back far enough in our evolution, we all derive from the same primitive culture. This common origin would seem to imply the existence of some common perceptual mechanisms and at least some shared cultural legacy among Homo sapiens everywhere. My approach owes something to both the modernist attempt to intuit universal insights and the more pragmatic, culture-oriented, postmodern approach. The latter does little to explain our remarkable creative capacities and dreams, but the former has little to do with political, social, and economic realities. Our fears seem to straddle both camps, fueled by our imaginations and by objective reality. My goal is create work that reflects a synthesis of these rather disparate conceptual systems in order to realize more fully the nature of our human heritage.