The Mississippi River watershed is almost unimaginably vast and varied. Trying to address the myriad dynamics that affect it seems impossible except to say something uselessly broad, like “They all relate to water.” But as a photographer and a sociologist who has lived almost his life within the watershed, I have a special interest in trying to understand it. Inspired by the environmental systems that unite the region, my project for New Middles focuses on two themes revealed in the landscape: systems of interconnection and representation.

Starting from the interconnections created by water, this project highlights the production, consumption, and distribution systems that generate local and global connections. Taking commercial agriculture as an example, the project puts small-scale community supported agriculture in southern Minnesota in dialogue with cattle feedlots in the Texas panhandle. In juxtaposition, we see how their shared reliance on the watershed manifests in dramatically different forms, pointing to the different dynamics that define their respective markets.

Amongst those complicated interconnections are also physical representations of people’s relationships with their surroundings. Along state highways and in residential neighborhoods are monumental forms of self-expression: oversized caricatures of Texan cowboys and murals expressing the hybrid iconography of Mexican-American life in rural Oklahoma. These creations say much about how people present themselves in relationship to the places where they live. By being public expressions, these works of art provide opportunities to connect with others through moments of curiosity, faith, and commerce, and ultimately reconnect with the political, economic, and cultural systems that facilitate the possibilities in the first place.

By combining these two elements, I wish to address those simultaneously personal and systematic interconnections between the environment, economics, and politics that are essential to understanding life these Middles. In the process, I hope that this locally-embedded approach can offer another inroad to establishing solutions to a changing climate, environmental justice, and more.