Reconnaissance: Boreal

Reconnaissance involves photographing empty, un-rented units at self-storage facilities. Each unit documented for this project is photographed twice: once from the inside looking out, and a second time from the outside looking in. These images of vacant exteriors and interiors privilege a view that is both a paean to landscape and a negation of it.

Often situated at the furthest edges of exurbia, self-storage facilities provide better access to pristine swaths of “nature” than do any pseudo-pastoral settings promised by suburban housing marketing campaigns. Ironically, with many out-of-the-way self-storage facilities, it is not the owner but the lowly off-cast, the underwanted item, the second-class object that ends up with the best “view” of the rusticatio locale that lies just outside the developer’s reach. As “envoys” that precede (and often predict) the next conquest of land by commercial interests—self-storage facilities are engaged in a kind of reconnaissance mission inside unclaimed territory. The paired photographic views of the units’ inside and outside spaces exist not only as points of demarcation in an uncertain landscape, but are also reminders of desire. While one view describes an interior architecture to be filled with what we have, the second view describes an exterior vista of what we might want.

Conceived as a multi-part project, Reconnaissance will eventually include several biome regions: Boreal, Hemiboreal, Montane, Artic Tundra, Temporate Stepp, Semi-Desert, Desert and Mediterranean.