Treasure Is Land
I live on Treasure Island. It is four hundred acres of bay mud dredged up in the 1930s to hold a world's fair, then handed to the Navy, then handed back, and it is now being rebuilt again as a neighborhood. None of it is original ground.
I started photographing it because I couldn't read it. A pile of rubble might be demolition or foundation. A stack of fence panels might be going up or coming down. A basketball court under piles of gravel might be abandoned or staged for work resuming Monday. The ambiguity between abandonment, decay, and renewal fascinates me.
Across the water, San Francisco is engineered to within an inch of itself and still manages to feel like chaos. I find it ironic that an island with the opposite reputation: historically thought of as the city's messy back lot is where I find structure and sculptural order: gravel sorted into mountains, dumpsters parked in a row, cable spools stacked by size, sandbags hung at even intervals down a tarp wall. None of it was arranged to be looked at, yet looking at it brings a calm that a hyper-engineered city cannot provide. It's what happens when there is enough room to set things down and enough time to leave them there.
