Richard K. Kent

After a decade mostly working on large landscape projects driven either by a well-defined concept or with a focus on specific places, I returned to documenting far more various kinds of landscape for a series entitled American Neighborhoods. The pictures are my attempt to come to terms with and reflect—albeit sometimes obliquely—our society's present circumstances, which often can be brutal or extremely cruel. They also show the increasingly pervasive collision of differing ideals. Inevitably, then, an aspect of the series probes disturbing undercurrents or outright, venomous divisions that inform the contemporary American body politic. Nevertheless, some of the pictures record instances of what I view as a quirky, poetic, perhaps even redeeming quality one occasionally finds in the ordinary American landscape. That is part of our world too. I see this series as participating in the tradition of American documentary photography. I present visual facts, but selected for larger implications—as readily apparent or sometimes enigmatic as those may be.

 

Pictures in the series have been selected for juried exhibitions in venues throughout the United States: American Landscapes 2021 and American Landscapes 2023, Maryland Federation of the Arts, Annapolis, MD; Reverberation, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; Interlines, Lifelines, Redlines: Social Markers of Race, Class & Economics, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Providence, RI.

 

Exhibition prints (16" x 20" images on 17" x 22" sheets) are archival pigment prints and are generated from either medium-format positive film frames or digital captures.