The Montana Hi-Line is a vast stretch of prairie running east-west across the entirety of northern Montana just below the Canadian border. It is a transportation corridor defined by the BNSF rail line and State Highway 2. The wide-open spaces are parsed into neat rectangles of mostly private land defined by the ubiquitous barbwire fences. It is land where Native Americans once hunted buffalo but now live on reservations, where big agribusiness is replacing family farming and ranching, and where small towns are disappearing. The open spaces and rugged, sparsely populated terrain are reminiscent of a rural America a century ago.

These photographs are inspired by a body of work called New Topographics, by Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, John Schott, and other noteworthy photographers who documented the human geography of the Western American landscape in the early 1970s. In that era, deserts were bring turned into affluent suburban housing tracts and business parks for an expanding middle class. The photographs presented here show the human geography in 21st century America in an era of economic scarcity and decline for rural communities. While each generation changes the land only to be changed again by future generations, there still remains the presence of something past. (2012 – 2017)