In 2018, we built a box camera for 11 × 14 black-and-white lithographic negative film. The camera has two lenses of different focal lengths that capture side-by-side round images. Over the course of the next year we traveled to twelve sites in the American West — Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, MacArthur Park (Los Angeles), Sequoia/Kings Canyon, the San Joaquin Valley, Zuma Beach, Death Valley, Mono Lake, Mammoth Lakes, the Bristlecone Forest, and Ventura — repeating the same routine in each place: drive, stop, take an exposure, drive on. Evenings were spent developing the day’s negatives in motel bathrooms turned into darkrooms. The 130 negatives became the source material for black-and-white fibre prints and a 1,500-page artists’ book.
By late 2019 we had produced more than 130 negatives. We used them to make offset plates, printing image over images to produce polychromatic kaleidoscopic prints, resulting in a more than one-thousand-page artist’s book and a hand-bound edition of 50 smaller volumes.
Unique hand-bound book with wood covers and color offset lithographic interior sheets, 10 3/4 x 16 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches.