Prisoners of Our Own Device
December 5 – 28, 1996
“Prisoners of Our Own Device” is an extended series of view camera photographs captured on the back roads of California, Nevada and Arizona. Over the course of two decades, starting in the 1990s, the project transitioned from black and white, printed in the darkroom (as shown at Blue Sky) to color images scanned and printed digitally on fine art papers.
I viewed the carelessly abused landscape of the West as a metaphor for capitalist greed and settler colonialism. The series also drew on my love/hate relationship with classic landscape photography.
POOD was exhibited and published several times in the US and other countries.
This is the original statement for the 1996 show at Blue Sky:
Are those shining condos on the hill a science-fiction utopia or an arrogant disaster? Is that pretty Sierra Club calendar an ecological statement or romantic escapism?
The way we plunder the natural world reveals more than environmental blindness. The scars we leave on the land betray a wider addiction to conquest and domination; a constant, casual recourse to hypocrisy and denial. We benefit from the machinery of plunder, but are ultimately trapped by it. No wonder even our own captive, domesticated landscape reproaches us.
David Stock has been photographing actively since 1965. His current photographs are social landscapes and complex street scenes. These investigate the contradictions, humor and beauty of city life, and the drama of human struggle with the natural world.
Stock’s photography has been widely exhibited and published in the US and abroad. He lives in New York City, and shows new work regularly at 440 Gallery in Brooklyn.