Pursuing the Horizon

Stephen Crane is most famous for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, but he was also an accomplished poet who used an impressionistic, naturalistic literary style, resulting in brief, powerful and bleak verse. He died at 28, but he left and indelible mark on the literary world with his prose and verse. As a practitioner of naturalism, Crane often used symbolism rather than realism in his writing. Literary scholar William Peden once said of Crane’s style, “[It] is often more impressionistic than photographic.”

Using digital composites, what is created are places that should not exist—perhaps places that we were never meant to have stumbled upon—to convey Crane’s literary intentions through a photographic medium. Each image is a digital construct, pieced together from multiple source imagery and recomposed into a new environment.