My home is Southern California, a sea of concrete highways and shopping malls, suburbia interspersed with farmlands. How we use our land, assign its value, and employ it as a resource threads through our wide nation, and radiates from our shores across the world.
In both the urban blocks and rural expanses, the American landscape possesses our conflicts and fascination with change, our acceptance of the rough harmony of determination and deterioration.
I photograph in the fields and community of Oxnard, where an ever-changing landscape reflects the combined pressures of farming, commercial development and suburbia. The immense wealth of productive farmland is the core of this community. The land is cultivated, harvested, and turned into itself, to which the process loop begins, again and again.
These photographs are about the fringe of suburbia, that transition from the earth that feeds us to the homes that consume the land and the businesses that manufacture our way of life. How do we place value on the soil that feeds us and then tear up crops to build a shopping mall, only to see it shuttered before completion and left to spoil? In what do we believe and how do we want to create our landscape?
— Kurt Jordan