Joseph Hocker

  For me, photography is an attempt to find myself within nature; it is a path I can follow to come home, to come back to the places I hold dear and where I feel most comfortable – in nature, behind a camera. When in this discovered habitat, devoting time to observing the wild, I experience nature as a shelter and as architecture, while still discovering its never-ending reaches. Through this exploration, I am able to understand myself and – as cliché as it sounds - find happiness. It is important to document the beauty in the land much in the way early photographers did, such as William Henry Jackson or Timothy O’Sullivan, as a way to bring the beauties and discoveries back to the rest of society to show the potential of unexplored land.

 My muse, my “go-to place,” is Palmyra Cove, a nature preserve and bird sanctuary in South Jersey bordering the Delaware River. This particular stretch of land has been used for many things over the years including off-roading and dredge silt depositing. Over time, activities like these have left the environment strewn with artifacts of visitors past; tires, shoes, bricks and other “junk” can be found throughout the preserve, along with deer, giant turtles, foxes and countless birds.  Here, I find a mixture of man-made objects and organic structures that make for interesting compositions, as well as stunning all-natural sites that stand in direct contrast to the artifacts man has left behind at the Cove.

 I have two goals in my image-making, one being that I want others to feel at home in my images, to be at home in my home – mi casa és su casa. I want other people to, at the bare minimum, have a yearning to see nature that would, hopefully, lead them to an actual experience. Society today dictates that we be accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, whether by cell-phone, email or social networking; people are terrified to leave their homes and offices and of being “out of cell range” or away from Wi-Fi that they have stopped exploring the world. I hope that by viewing my images, people will want to break out of the great indoors and into the wild again. The second goal is actually a bit on the selfish side. My images act as a memory recall for me, so that I can remember the places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had within them. These memories also help to fuel new ideas for future photographs. I hope that my images and my experiences in making them help influence viewers in a positive way.

 

However, I also find myself documenting the world around me, wherever I may be and whatever catches my eye. Along with nature, I often find myself inspired by quite the opposite – industry, technology, and man-made marvels. One place I often find myself returning to is the broken down, not-so-shiny-new Americana; abandoned buildings or cars, empty amusement parks and roadside oddities intrigue me in a much different way than nature does. These landmarks, more often than not, get ignored once their doors are locked up or the ribbon-cutting ceremony is over. Their purposes seem to disappear once the keys to the doors get tossed in the trash. We take these places and these monuments for granted, but they hold a sense of our culture and our history within them. It is important to recognize our fallen businesses, landmarks and the like as culturally significant; recording their images in their more desolate states (as opposed to monuments that are “alive and kicking”) indicates what was once important to us. It is important to highlight these places as more than just a turning point on your road trip to anywhere – turn right at the giant apple, or you’ve gone too far when you reach the abandoned movie theater. 

 

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JosephHocker.com