During the later decades of the 20th century, physicists conducted a series of now famous experiments based on the theory of the Observer Effect, which postulates that the act of observing an object or a phenomenon physically alters it. In these experiments, the tiniest quantum particles of the matter, the stuff that makes up our world, were shown to exist in an indeterminate limbo before they were noticed. As one of the experimenters, American quantum physicist John Wheeler described, “we are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participants. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”

A Participatory Universe is an ongoing photography project that asks what happens when we intentionally observe something that we had not previously noticed. Over the past few years, I have installed a black aluminum frame in neglected landscapes across the American West to explore how focused attention and framing can transform their perceived meaning and significance. I carried the frame into landscapes of nothingness, the spare, empty spaces we drive by without really seeing, the in-between places on our way to something more worthy of our attention. Framing an object or an image is a technique our minds are all accustomed to as a way to underscore importance or meaning. 

With each image, I, the photographer and you, the viewer, both become observers in this experiment: when we bring focused attention to these vistas that previously existed in some unseen limbo, do they change? Does the nothingness become a somethingness? Does the act of framing the scene give it meaning that it did not inherently possess until we noticed it?