I want to photograph the New Wilderness, a wilderness that includes us. Natural Parks and nature preserves do not interest me, as they are tokens of some bygone era or totems to our frontier past. What I want to photograph is the wilderness of the present.
I am a biologist at heart. When I look at a landscape I see an ecological system and when I look at a human I see an animal. Our animal instincts simmer away beneath our apparent modernity, and I want to describe these instincts seeping out and making themselves evident. Survival, dominance, and sexuality intertwine in our everyday interaction with the land; these are the themes that our species has relied upon to proliferate. I am not going to portray our dominance over the landscape as a product of our technology, but as something wild, an instinct that supersedes our will.
Weeded lots, shallow streams, struggling forests, fallow fields, and forgotten woods harbor a thin veil of wilderness around the shrinking farmland and small cities of America. This is the landscape of the new wilderness. Unlike Yosemite, it is unkempt and hungry. It is the landscape that turns a housecat wild. Children enter and become hunters, instinctively enacting the rites and rituals that connect them to the primeval human struggle with nature. This landscape and these animals are not a part of the Edenic garden of our Arcadian fantasy. They rise from the wild and are bound to it just like us.
Our dominance over the wilderness is a myth of control. It plays on our instincts, gathering us where fish swim, driving us to hunt when we don't need food, calling us to survey the territory by foot or by Jeep, and beckoning us to make an open and wide space for our own protection. We may believe that our ability to mold the landscape around us is an essential element in our power as a species, but we are riding on a river of earth that bends around the seasons and courses through the millennia. The changing view it offers is not merely a setting for our everyday narrative, but a phenomenon that forces us to adapt and evolve.
I travel in between the towns and on the outer rim of the cities to photograph the nascent wilderness all around us, however mediated it is by human expansion. I photograph the frontier, the place we are drawn by instinct to tame. I describe the tense balance between the people and the land, between the wild and the controlled, and depict a nature from which we are inextricable.
– JW