"I have often wondered in what way forgotten history abides, and what the consequences are of its being forgotten or brought to mind again. I have always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that pass through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and so are names. Universalism is beautiful, and so are particulars.
I didn't write the previous paragraph; Marilynne Robinson did, in her essay "A Great Amnesia." but I couldn’t possibly come up with a better way to express how I feel when I’m making photographs."
All photographs from the series A Most Serene Republic
All Images © Tim Carpenter
