During the course of the last year a large number of beavers established themselves along the small, crooked creek that winds along one side of my property in the Adirondack park in upstate New York. As they built more and more dams and eventually began felling trees adjacent to the house, threatening access to the fields as well as the house's septic system, a trapper was reluctantly called in. I am still wrestling with this decision, and decided to photograph what was left behind after the beavers were removed.

These images of the aftermath of that decision depict a landscape where a variety of forces and impulses collide, photographs of a crime scene where I am both chronicler and perpetrator. Here is a landscape where our mythologies of nature and the realities of our daily lives combine in an uneasy confusion, an analogue to our relationship with the environment on a cultural as well as a personal level; I moved to the Adirondacks because of my love of nature and I try to live my life with respect and concern for the future of our planet. I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations... and I kill Beavers. This is the landscape of that confusion, the trapper's lament.

April 2011-October 2011 - images from THE TRAPPER'S LAMENT featured in Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment at the New Mexico Museum of Art [buy the book] April 2011 - interview with Antone Dolezal in Finitefoto May 2010 - THE TRAPPER'S LAMENT selected by Darius Himes for first Hey, Hot Shot! Curator's Choice Award