Jordan Putt
Field Book
Photography
Project Statement
Field Book is a meditation on place and the mythology surrounding life in the Southwestern United States. Starting at the age of 12, I began to learn the trade of land surveying from my father. Each day, I would walk through the desert landscape, using a GPS to mark property boundaries and record map coordinates. Eventually, I landed a job as a land surveyor for the City of Tucson in 2016. The act of photographing the space parallelled my process of mapping, each creating abstractions of the physical geography bound by the four edges of the frame. I became interested in the way that land surveys and photographic expeditions recorded the region and, in so doing, shaped historic conceptions of the American West.
From the photographers who accompanied the early survey expeditions of the new frontier in the 1800’s to the documentary surveys of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930’s, photography has been essential to characterizing the shifting social and physical landscape of the western United States. Each of the early documentary surveys came during historic moments which called for us to look inward to understand the physical and social fabric that made up our country. Noticing a similar historic shift in the American social structure at the beginning of 2016, I began to look inward at my hometown of Tucson, Arizona.
Working within the same documentary tradition and covering the same region as many of the early surveys, Field Book adds a contemporary perspective to the ongoing narrative of the Western United States. In a region just an hour north of the contested borderlands of the United States-Mexico border, this work examines a far more complicated relationship to the western landscape, one that counters the familiar tropes of weathered miners or heroic cowboys. Instead, we peek into those living on the fringes of the western frontier and find familiarities within our own lives. Field Book consists of archival maps, landscapes, and portraits that weave into each other to compare the varying abstractions of the physical space and those who exist within that space. The portraits range from childhood friends to complete strangers, each resembling the complex characters who populated my time living within the dry hills of the Arizona desert.
The title of this work is a reference to the early field books used by land surveyors. Historically, the field book functioned as a record of the physical traverse through space that could be used by future surveyors to retrace the same journey. In this vain, Field Book retraces the early documentary surveys and becomes a guide to be repeated in the future to continue to understand our shifting cultural and social climate in the Western United States. Functioning both as a physical exhibition with overlapping photographic and archival elements as well as an artist book, Field Book establishes a visual survey of the city that raised me: Tucson, Arizona.
Artist Biography
Jordan Putt is a photographer based in Tucson, Arizona, whose work responds to issues of place, identity, and community. He earned a BA in Psychology from Northern Arizona University in 2014 and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2020. His work has been exhibited in the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson; Filter Space, Chicago; House of Lucie, Los Angeles; and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; among others. He was a 2020 recipient of the Albert P. Weisman Award and a 2020 finalist for the Dorothea Lange - Paul Taylor Award.