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My four months in the Salt Lake valley during the pandemic.
I had moved here in November 2020 after returning from Italy — where I had been for four months before on temporary duty orders with the Naval Reserves — everything was uncertain and I was unsettled having realized New York City was not so viable as a living situation while in prolonged lockdown. One action leading to the next, the years between 2018 - 2021 were very transient and unsettled, and I think this shows in my images of Utah. Lacking people, I think I had trouble forming relationships as I had just moved there and normal interactions were hampered by social distancing. I had never spent time out west before, and my impressions were that these were new cities, planned cities, cities that had grown in the last 50 years and had paved and zoned over any existing history — unlike say New York City, London, Athens, Naples… cities I had all recently experienced while on deployment with the US Navy from the previous few years.
My initial intention had been to go out west to a mountain, where I could enjoy the winter season, work at a ski slope, and document the life of a lift crew there.
But I was so lonely that I gave up and spent most of my time drinking, watching soccer, and driving around trying to purchase an RV trailer with which to travel the land and make photographs in solitude.
I spent a great deal of time eating fast food and browsing local liquor stores, and grew frustrated at the mild weather and sprained ankles that prohibited me from living out my skiing dreams. I tried very hard to make the documentary project work, but there just wasn’t a very engaging angle on it and I’ve let it go. However the images that remain interesting are my impressions of the incredible scale of the landscapes and how the suburban Mormon sprawl and industrial plants eat away at the land. The Salt Lake itself is more of a swamp, a morass, a bog crisscrossed by dykes and train tracks for the salt mines. There are no street names, just numbered blocks indicating your proximity to the Mormon temple headquarters. Drinking laws are so conservative there is a strong subculture of alcohol abuse despite the strict 5.5% limit. Everything is friendly and suburban and corporate on the surface, but due to the brainwash and disillusionment of young people with the prevailing Mormon ruling class, there is a huge undercurrent of free spirit adventurers, living in vans in climbing gym parking lots and ski slopes. Just a more conscionable way to live.
I think the images I made communicate annoyance with how Man gets in the way of Nature, building roads to mountains, smogging up the valleys, chopping down trees to build traffic lights, and putting flags and slogans over it all.
‘What is this idea of America? What is this new thing that has arrived in the last 200 years?’ I objectively questioned. I was very recently in a position to give my life for my country, and because of that I had decided that I ought to see the place that I had purportedly agreed to give so much for. Driving out west I found a new network and sprawl constructed and maintained to extract resources and wealth, this is a place where the mountains are fenced off and the pollution grows lines at the carwash.
I was disappointed and my images show that.
The very language of the land had been stolen and perverted as well. “Ute” was the local indigenous tribal name, and the Mormon pioneers led by Brigham Young had eventually changed the spelling. Ute is now the nickname of the local state university. The University of Utah Utes. The U of U Utes.
The land of the Ute’s is obscured by modern society’s sprawl, but remains the backdrop still to this region.
