[squareamerica.com]the photographic component of my division three, perhaps
I hope to explore social, cultural, and economic capital in terms of the death of the American Dream and social mobility. My fieldwork will take me to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I will use Bethlehem Steel, as both a locus for this investigation and as a metaphor. The images will concern the transformation of space over time and the constantly changing meanings people ascribe to previously inhabited and now abandoned areas. I hope to photograph Bethlehem Steel in a way that challenges the viewer to reexamine a space that, at one point, was a factory of time, labor, sweat, and sometimes death. In romanticizing these spaces, I would like to understand how we might use beauty as a coping mechanism in both dealing with past toils and reconciling present strife in economic and social modernity. I am curious to photograph allegories within Bethlehem Steel that convey perhaps a quiet solitude or innate aesthetic that partially masks but ultimately recreates a historical context. I hope to create portraits of space and landscape that convey an investigative and aesthetically aware sense of the passage of time.
