I am a visual artist based in Buda, Texas specializing in photographic historical processes. The project I am presenting for review concerns a flood that destroyed my home town back in 1997 in North Dakota.

I recently learned about this word that train conductors used to use for towns that there was no reason to stop at. They call them “Jerkwater Towns”. The term referred to the lack of a water station for the trains and stopping was only for emergencies. They would haul the water up in buckets. Basically jerking them up so they didn’t have to get out of the train. That word stuck with me because I deeply understand it. I am from a Jerkwater type town. No one seems to go there if they don’t have to.

I was thirteen when my house, along with everyone else’s in town, was destroyed in a flood. We left, with little warning, in the middle of the night. I remember my family driving slowly through rising water as we headed further and further out of town. The water felt like an inevitability. Houses had drifted away and the fires that started devoured the rest. To leave your town both drowning and on fire as you take shelter elsewhere is a vivid memory of mine.

This project centers around a community that had been torn apart by a natural disaster decades earlier. It explores how people and landscapes can be forever altered; even if on the surface everything seems back to normal. My process for exploring these themes is to use a large format camera and x-ray film. Using x-ray film has it’s challenges and eccentricities. It is an orthochromatic film meaning it is blue light sensitive and blue skies will be completely white. However, in a climate such as North Dakota, the skies are usually overcast. This lends to the formation of ‘ghost-like” shadows in the sky. Reminding us of past events and lingering trauma. This project examines the lasting effects of a natural disaster long after the fact. It holds space in the minds and memories of the people who still live there and the vacant areas where buildings and homes once stood.