The Cabin

2009 — Photography

32"x44" c-prints from 4”×5” Kodachrome film slides

The Cabin is a photographic documentation of my family’s cabin in the Colorado Rockies that has been passed down through five generations. I made these images during a period when the family dynamics were undergoing significant shifts, and the sense of impending change shaped the way I approached the work.

Anticipating loss and alteration, I used photography as a way to hold the place in a kind of suspended attention—recording not only its physical details, but the specific feeling of being in it at that time. The 4×5 press camera I used was itself a family heirloom I inherited, which folded the act of photographing back into the same lineage as the site it was documenting.

In working this way, I began to think of the cabin less as a fixed site and more as something continuously rewritten by inheritance, use, and time. The photographs become a personal archive of that instability, where preservation and disappearance sit very close together.

Family photos

The cabin shortly after purchase. It was a log fishing shack built in 1935, my great-grandparents and paternal grandmother bought it in 1941 for two payments of $675. Its official name was NoCaDo for the first two letters of my great-grandparents and grandmother's first names, but most of the family always just called it "The Cabin."
My grandmother at the cabin in the 1940s, cleaning a pot. There was no true kitchen originally, just the wood-burning cast iron stove you can see the stovepipe for.
Circa 1940s, after the front patio was screened in and turned into the dining room.
Back deck of the cabin - date unknown but prior to 1970s addition of second bedroom and bathroom.
The cabin in 1959 with Lions Head in view (the mountain is now part of Staunton State Park).
My grandfather and my two uncles on a summer Cabin trip in 1959.
1959 - view looking southwest off the back deck
1980s - My grandmother admiring the new "wombat crossing" sign installed on the big front lodgepole pine, acquired on her and my grandfather's grand tour of New Zealand. It's still up there, as far as I know.
2000s - My grandmother at the cabin on one of the family holiday trips, in her father's favorite rocking chair.
The carpet - the most memorable part of the cabin. Installed during the 1970s addition, my grandmother always explained her choice of pattern as "you'd never see a single sin on that carpet" and you know, she was right.
2014 - view of Lions Head off the back deck. The wires are an elaborate contraption my grandmother invented to keep the squirrels away from her dearly loved bird feeder (a fruitless endeavor).