For the last six years, I have photographed beaches, parks, campgrounds and swimming holes across the country; places where people immerse themselves within the landscape to ‘feel intimately connected with nature’. By showing moments when my subjects and environments seem vulnerable, I aim to represent the deliberate or fortuitous tension between them. In these moments, physically engaging connections to the landscape can be seen in a gesture or an expression, rendering visual records of the underlying emotional or psychological states. In nineteenth-century American art, man stands in awe before boundless nature. In the literature of the period, individuals searched (heading out and west) for unique geographical identities. In the twentieth century, however, as the formerly boundless spaces between New England and California filled up, and time spent inside increased, people's imaginative and actual relationship to the landscape transformed. In my people-nature photographs, one can see some of these changes. This portfolio shows a cross-section of modern America and makes visible the way we collectively define the landscape and are defined by it.
– Justin Kimball
Justin Kimball received his MFA in photography from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture and a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund (both helped complete his current portfolio). He received awards in the Gordon Parks Competition, Photo Metro and the Project Competition, Santa Fe Center for Visual Arts. His pictures were featured on the cover and in the pages of Double Take Magazine's Fifth Anniversary Issue, in The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore, in The Physical Print by Richard Benson and in Photography by London, Upton and Stone. A monograph of his photographs, Where We Find Ourselves, will be published by The Center for American Places and Columbia College in the spring of 2006. His photographs are held in numerous public and private collections, including: The Library of Congress, The Corcoran Gallery of Fine Art, Smith College Museum of Art, Mount Holyoke Museum of Art, The Weeks Gallery and The Mead Museum of Art. Kimball is a visiting assistant professor of Fine Arts at Amherst College and lives with his wife, pianist Maura Glennon, and their son Zeke in Florence, Massachusetts.