Places in Between is an ongoing documentation of spaces that are throughways from one location to the next. The environments photographed are ones we are not intended to stay in for a long time or think of as their own entities, let alone consider them a home. Usually, these spaces have no defined place for themselves aside from their relationship to where we are coming from and where we are going.
My interest in these locations stems from my childhood. I moved a lot, but also spent time in between various homes and states. As a child who did not know much different, these places became comfortable, and remain so today. The mundanity of the side of the road and the empty calmness of gas stations late at night are very familiar, along with the beneficence of an unoccupied lot you can park in for a while, and the comfort within cheap motels. I reflect on these locations not only through imagery, but also through gas receipts from 1996-2004 and 2008 that my father meticulously filed and stored. As individual objects, a date and locations stamp is displayed, creating a map of transience when together.
I leave many of these environments open and minimal, suggesting that there is room for the viewer to stay. Others are closely photographed and highly reflecting of details I would frequently notice, such as cars sitting at gas stations for seemingly too long, or the items on the dining table of my family’s camper. Life presents its more unraveled self in these environments, but by elevating them and engulfing viewers in the same details I was once surrounded by, they become much more than just the places in between.
Rozel Bay
Documentation from time living and working in Denali, Sequoia, and Yellowstone National Parks
