I was first introduced to Kurt Jordan’s work this summer, when he submitted this terrific image of stock piled firewood to the Lenscratch 4th of July exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His work has a quiet elegance, not afraid to explore simplicity and subjects that are often over looked. Kurt has worked as a commercial and architectural photographer with his images appearing in magazines such as Sunset, Architectural Record, and Phoenix Home and Garden. After years of working and raising a family, Kurt and his family bought a boat and spent three years traveling the world. He is now back on land and looking at the world wth a camera in hand.

Statement for Looking at America:
This is a visual journal.
It is my longest running conversation.
I continue to engage in photographing my experience to learn about America. Originally conceived on the streets of San Francisco while attending the San Francisco Art Institute, with a 35mm camera at my hip, I documented street life in Chinatown and the Financial District. I see that early work resonating and informing even my most recent images. The urban images, the farm images, the images of my children all are made from the idea of that first conversation “Who am I as an American and what is America?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am interested in and responding to our ever-changing cultural landscape. Each image holds a fragment, a something that becomes a larger story. I am satisfied to begin with just a few sentences of understanding, one image at a time, to begin to mine the complexity of being an American and living here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Statement for Farmscapes: My home is Southern California, a sea of concrete highways and shopping malls, suburbia interspersed with farmlands. How we use our land, assign its value, and employ it as a resource threads through our wide nation, and radiates from our shores across the world. In both the urban blocks and rural expanses, the American landscape possesses our conflicts and fascination with change, our acceptance of the rough harmony of determination and deterioration.

Images from Farmscapes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I photograph in the fields and community of Oxnard, where an ever-changing landscape reflects the combined pressures of farming, commercial development and suburbia. The immense wealth of productive farmland is the core of this community. The land is cultivated, harvested, and turned into itself, to which the process loop begins, again and again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These photographs are about the fringe of suburbia, that transition from the earth that feeds us to the homes that consume the land and the businesses that manufacture our way of life. How do we place value on the soil that feeds us and then tear up crops to build a shopping mall, only to see it shuttered before completion and left to spoil? In what do we believe and how do we want to create our landscape?