Cape Disappointment is a photo series that documents the hyperreal visual vernacular of the distinctive towns of the coastal northwest — places where historical, cultural, commercial, and domestic forces layer to create a confounding visual melange.
Description
Shot over the last ten years, Cape Disappointment takes its name from a landform that acts as its tonal and geographical focus. The project focuses on the constructed landscape — the regions’ geology simulated in a molded plastic play structures; a giant fiberglass wave on a waveless beach; a tableau of Christ painted on oil tanks and left to corrode under the heavens.
Cape Disappointment, the book, was made possible by a grant from The Regional Arts & Culture Council and is available free to residents of the Oregon and Washington coast. Proceeds from inland sales will go toward future printings.
If you live on the coast and would like a copy please click below.
Cape Disappointment - The Photo Book
In a nod to the ephemerality of its subject matter, this photo book was printed on non-archival paper and will visibly fade if left in the sun — the screen printed sleeve was designed to act like a photographic negative, creating a permanent sun-print of the title design.
The series takes its name from a landform that acts as both the tonal and geographical focus of the series: the metaphorical infamy for innumerable shipwrecks; the regions' role as the end-of-the-road of western expansionism; the emotional centrality of John Jacob Astor IV's failed coastal metropolis; the dreary tourist facades of gutted logging towns and fishing hubs; and the terminus of the Columbia River — and all the hopes pinned to it.
