David Zimmerman

The ‘purple mountain majesties’ which Katharine Lee Bates reflected on when writing the words to America the Beautiful, would likely be unrecognizable to her today. Humankind appears intent on consuming all of what was a seemingly endless landscape in Bates’ day. However, we may at least credit ourselves with recognizing some value in wild places. We guard their remains behind the high fences of pay-as-you-go national parks.

Humanity’s relationship with the natural world is problematic. While humankind is broadly seen as a part of nature, human activity is often thought of as a separate category from other natural phenomena. Human activities are largely destabilizing the fundamental balance of the global climate system.

The pictures from the work Vestiges are not about deformations of the picturesque. Rather, they are examples of human activity that are more interesting, less-than-monotonous, and sometimes quizzical efforts, aspirations, and constructions within the places we live. With the knowledge of their impermanence, we might then view these anonymous abandoned structures and traces of our presence in a more informed and compelling framework.

Walker Evans once commented, “A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful. That’s because you’re seeing. Some people are able to see that—see it and feel it. I lean towards the enchantment, the visual power, of the aesthetically rejected subject.”

Ambiguity and visual contradictions offer a broad palette of possible narratives. The architectural variety and spatial organization, the opportunity to consider the phenomenon of change and loss, and the meditative and utter stillness of these places become valuable and thoughtful resources within the clutter and rubble of today’s ‘purple mountain majesties.’

(2018 - 2021)

American Pictures are snapshots of an America in the midst of wide-spread social transformation. Increasingly divided and burdened with romantic myths and separatist rhetoric, there remains an intrinsic tone of optimism, confidence, and humor in the American cultural landscape.

The current, seemingly chaotic social and political atmosphere in America is a well-considered agenda.

Delusions and divisions driven by a corrosive political narrative provoke fear, suspicion, and injustice.

Ultra-nationalism, an unfathomable war machine, false narratives of freedom and democracy, and the mocking of civil liberties creates anger, escalating into violence. The United States’ program of mass surveillance and control is at the doorstep of authoritarianism.

Millions of Americans are living a precarious existence. The working-poor face eviction and families are separated as workers must travel far from home for employment, many of whom live in bleak and deteriorating conditions, shoulder to shoulder in RV’s, trailers, “man camps” or in cars.

The Agenda crushes the marginalized and unheard, who are struggling to survive in an America where they are not valued and have little hope.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges writes, “The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress.” (1)

Within this dreariness, there still exist gestures of humor and beauty.

Portraits from the Tibetan Diaspora

(2012 - 2018) 

For the past two decades, my work has focused on endangered landscapes and cultures displaced by environmental, social, economic, and political causes. Large outside forces beyond a population's control; war, energy exploitation, water rights, and political ideology provoke consequences ultimately suffered by the people who are either forced to live in a damaged place or who are driven to leave; abandoning their former lives. In the mid-1990's I began exploring the Indian Subcontinent, focusing on life along the Ganges River Basin where an estimated 400 million people live. It was during these times, working in northern India, that I met and began hearing the stories of Tibetan exiles; tens of thousands of whom live in settlement camps from south-India into the northern-most Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir. The Tibetan culture has been in a state of disarray since the Chinese invasion of the 1950s. Over 150,000 Tibetans have fled Chinese persecution in Tibet to countries willing to grant them asylum. Humble by nature, Tibetans agreed to be photographed for the benefit of their people. Those who declined did so out of fear of Chinese reprisal to their families left behind in Tibet. The portraits and interviews are of a cross-section of Tibetan exile society; nomads and revolutionaries, the impoverished and members of Parliament, street vendors, teachers, monks, former political prisoners, artists, and high lamas. The photographs I have taken chronicle a civilization displaced from its homeland, scattered throughout the world, fighting for its very identity.

In his essay “The Last Individuals,” Robert Hariman writes, “The portraits are profoundly evocative precisely because they draw on deep wells of moral and artistic truth. By risking dismissal for being conventional, they each paradoxically achieve the singularity of a work of art.”

Zimmerman's monograph One Voice has been published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.

these words

separation isolation
desolation destination
a rented room a cold hearth
life strife survive thrive
a light from a borrowed lamp
fly ride walk crawl
a roadside home a black hole
pray say cry talk
mother’s ears not here
sound shout pound scream
resist much obey little
struggle struggle march march

Bhuchung D Sonam

Dharamshala, India

(2011)

There is a hidden beauty in many things, and the pile of abandoned clothing attracted me first by its palette and form, and by its odd two-dimensionality.

Then I met the man who lived beneath it. He was a 27-year veteran firefighter in Montana whose job and pension were lost in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. He is one of 40 million impoverished Americans living in the United States.

His shelter was a hole in the ground, roofed with tin and supported by an abandoned refrigerator. He scavenged for discarded clothing which became thatch for the roof to repel the scorching summer sun and to insulate against frigid winter nights.

This weather-beaten pile of clothing became an inventory of human existence.

"...Zimmerman's work is unique in that it is positioned at the crossroads of two traditions: landscape photography and the study of the impact of man on his environment, represented by photographers such as Robert Adams and Richard Misrach, both of whom he admires; and humanistic photography in the tradition of the Farm Security Administration, which documented the great migrations in the wake of the Depression. Whether indirectly, through photos of the territory, or directly, through portraits, it is always people who are at the center of Zimmerman's preoccupations".

- Carole Naggar

Time and form studies

Triptychs. Arabian Sea

(2016-2019}

Each of these 11 Seascape studies was created by examining hundreds of individual frames, photographed within several minutes of each other. The composition of each triptych did not exist as a single frame in time but came to exist by connecting elements of repeated form, thereby compressing time, into a singular landscape. It is in this compression of time that the endless continuance of form in nature becomes increasingly visible.

(2007 - 2009)

Wild places have always fascinated me. Growing up along the Great Lakes, the vast expanses and endless horizons offered an opportunity to wander in a dream-like journey, to an existence in some alternate reality. The virtual journeys I would take looking out to the horizon offered respite, but at the same time summoned questions for which I had no answers.

The deserts are places where solitude is magnified by the extreme character of the place, notably the dune fields of North America. The harshness of the desert discourages most living things - plant, and animal. Consequently, the desert becomes purely elemental, devoid of the visual chaos of other landscapes. Lacking distractions, natural and man-made, leaves one with a simple list of things to consider - light, form, and self. This feeling of reflective solitude ultimately becomes the greatest challenge while working in these vast landscapes.

We may venture into the wilderness seeking calm and reprieve from chaos. What we bring into the wild often seems to be what we find.

"...a unique vision of beauty, poetry, and power possible in great landscape photography."

- Mary Ellen Mark

(2010 - 2012)

Wild places have always fascinated me. Growing up along the Great Lakes, the vast expanses and endless horizons offered an opportunity to wander in a dream-like journey, to an existence in some alternate reality. The virtual journeys I would take looking out to the horizon offered respite, but at the same time summoned questions for which I had no answers.

The deserts are places where solitude is magnified by the extreme character of the place, notably the dune fields of North America. The harshness of the desert discourages most living things - plant, and animal. Consequently, the desert becomes purely elemental, devoid of the visual chaos of other landscapes. Lacking distractions, natural and man-made, leaves one with a simple list of things to consider - light, form, and self. The feeling of reflective solitude ultimately becomes the greatest challenge while working in these vast landscapes.

We may venture into the wilderness seeking calm and reprieve from chaos. What we bring into the wild often seems to be what we find.

"...a unique vision of beauty, poetry, and power possible in great landscape photography."

- Mary Ellen Mark

Composite tree forms and shadow.

(2013 - 2015) 

Kolkata, in the Indian state of West Bengal, is home to 14 million people. It is known for its artistic, literary, and revolutionary history. Filmmaker Satyajit Ray and poet Rabindranath Tagore lived and worked in Kolkata, as do contemporary artists Paresh Maity and Jagannath Paul.

Kolkata’s urban center is transforming rapidly. Its treasured and varied neighborhoods (paras) and its distinctive colonial architecture are under pressure as random planning and gentrification encroach on these historic sites. It is in these "paras" where the soul of Kolkata thrives.

Despite its urban chaos, poverty, crumbling colonial facade, and history of revolutionary politics, Kolkata remains resilient.

Amit Chaudhuri writes, “Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.”

(2010)

Portraits of local inhabitants of this coastal Louisiana community in the wake of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hundreds of oil cleanup laborers worked day and night, mostly at minimum wage, to rake the beaches of tar balls along the Louisiana coast as oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon made landfall. BP meanwhile, with U.S. Government approval, was dumping millions of gallons of toxic oil dispersants into the Gulf to conceal the vastness of this unprecedented catastrophe.

Scientists estimate that the environmental damage that was done by the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and subsequent dumping of toxic dispersants, could take 300 years for the Gulf of Mexico to recover.

The cover-up of events in the Gulf was on a massive scale. Journalists, writers, scientists, environmentalists, photographers, and filmmakers, were harassed and threatened with arrest for recording or photographing on public lands and public waterways.

For all the devastation I saw offshore, the worst of what I saw was onshore; in the faces and voices of the people who call this place home.

In November 2012, BP plead guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter for the deaths of 11 of its oil platform workers. No one has ever gone to prison.

(2008 - 2009)

barriers walls obstacles isolation intimidation segregation frustration exclusion coercion deception discrimination suspicion distortion incarceration

“You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.”

“I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.”

Lauren Oliver, Delirium (Delirium #1)