The photographs in Blue of Distance were created with expired Polaroid 669 film, purchased when Polaroid discontinued its instant analog film production in 2008. The film’s distinctive color shifts toward blue as its chemistry ages, echoing Rebecca Solnit’s description of blue as the color of distance—the atmospheric space between oneself and what can never fully be reached.

I made the images during my time at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California; Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado; on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi; and while living in Japan. These landscapes have become sites of personal nostalgia, photographed with a material that carries its own sense of loss. Polaroid film was formative to my early experience of photography, and its obsolescence gives the images a material nostalgia that parallels the emotional distance of the places they depict. The series considers how landscapes become repositories of desire, nostalgia, and ecological grief. It reflects on the changing environments we inherit and the emotional distances that emerge when familiar places are altered, rendered inaccessible, or lost.

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.... For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains." -Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost