Here is Where the Map Should Fold
"Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
In 2015, I moved back to my hometown of Mandan, North Dakota after spending ten years away. I began photographing almost immediately, while the memories of my childhood were still vivid. The experience was uncanny, as if I had walked into my family's photo album.
Over time my memories began to compete with the place in front of me, because it was not exactly as I remembered it. I realized I was photographing two places simultaneously, the Mandan I knew and the Mandan I was rediscovering.
Change came incrementally. Riverbanks eroded. A tree was cut down next to the pond. A bus stop was removed on Sunset Drive, but a slab of cement remained. It wasn't until I began looking back through the photographs, years into the project, that I realized how much had changed.
I have now spent as much time photographing Mandan as I once spent away from it.
Photographs made from 2016 - 2025
