Skye Shannon Savage, PhD

Photography

I am interested in photography as a method of documentation and transformation. I shoot primarily black and white in-camera with a Sony a6700. Although the photos are digital, I avoid any manipulation outside of the camera with the exception of cropping. No photos may be used without my permission. For prints and other use inquiries, please contact me at skyessavage@pm.me.

The Non-Heroic Landscape (documenting inland California), Artist Statement:
“I have been haunted for many years now by the notion of the “non-heroic landscape.” It is a phrase I heard in Colorado from my first year creative writing professor, and in my memory he connected it to the works of William H. Gass. Both he and Gass were from the Midwest, and in contrast to the drama of the Bierstadt-rendered landscapes of the Rocky Mountains we were so close to, the non-heroic made an intuitive amount of sense. A way to take ownership of the negation presented by the “boring,” the plains, the low hills. I am not from the Midwest, but the Southwest, and while the likes of O’Keefe and others have long since immortalized the desert, my hometown–east county San Diego, seems to fall flat. It’s just hills, just chaparral, just scrubland. It burns regularly, is colored in the same drab beiges and browns every day of the year unless it rains. Embracing this land as non-heroic, something usually passed over, allows for the negation to invert. Rather than describing what this land is, you say what it isn’t. But this generates interest in and of itself. Turning my camera to it, I look for textures, smallnesses, abstractions, lack of drama. The heroic doesn’t need explanation, it’s as obvious as a glistening waterfall or the darkening forest. The non-heroic asks for your attention, your consideration, and your willingness to see otherwise.”