Last year I began making pictures in Boulder’s access controlled Open Spaces, in drainages, and in other places nameless to most of us. These places exist as margins of habitat contiguous to Boulder’s urban and commercial/industrial environments.  I go into these places to make pictures because I am curious about them, and because the pictures made there seem fresh, and less rehearsed than those made in more traditional landscape environments.

These places are substantially trashed with stuff brought into them by playing kids and surreptitious campers, but most of the debris migrates through from the outside on the flows of the weather. While some of the photographs depict this condition, and the proximity of these places to developed spaces, others, seem to me to reveal a wildness that transcends their proximity to our urban life. They reveal places that feel natural to me, and I am surprised by that revelation. I find the pictures interesting, and also beautiful. I believe that this is so because of a raw and dynamic character in these places compelling of that beauty.

In these margins flourish seminal forces that are sustaining, unifying and harmonious. I hope the dignity of the pictures is an acknowledgment of the worth of these places.

Richard Van Pelt

February 24, 2007