This is a portrait of my adopted city and its surrounds. Albuquerque is unlike any city I have ever known, an urban desert, in the desert. Here one encounters a complete absence of the typical design flourishes and architectural coherence of distant world capitals, that fill (or assault) the senses and dictate response, in other words the tyrrany of design ... as if this place sprung fully formed from the head of Donald Judd.
This is a place of subtlety. These photographs attempt to portray the melancholic blank negative spaces that define the Albuquerque experience. They were, initially, an attempt to compensate for this city's lack of an urban pulse. This was followed by discovery, and ultimately liberation. This place forces its residents to actively participate in beauty and interpretation, a rebuke to the passive & effortless consumption of typical urbanism "with a view." The empty, powerfully subjective desert surrounds in every direction, indifferent to humanism and human proportions, and Albuquerque reflects its desert and coexists with it without conflict.
Heath photo
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