The End of the Dream – Installing dystopian billboards throughout California

The End of the Dream is a series of photographic installations portraying the three challenges endangering California’s existence: drought, wildfire, and housing. I installed 23 billboards throughout the state last summer, followed by 900 large posters in San Francisco in the previous four months. The self-funded project aims to provide an impartial record of California’s present condition through images, without any text or call to action. The project has been covered by the LA Times, USA Today, and 8 television stations in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

The Beginning of the project

From the gold rush in the 1840s to the tech boom of the 2010s, the California Dream has always represented the promise of fresh starts, freedom, and limitless prosperity. But that dream has been threatened in recent years. Extreme wildfires, drought, and the homelessness crisis have made California’s future look more like a dystopia than a paradise. Encampments that resemble those in the poorest of countries exist in every city. Wildfires burn uncontained for months. Once-in-a-generation droughts are commonplace. As Ben Jackson wrote in 2021 in the London Review of Books, “This year is not the new normal; if anything, we will never have it so good again.”

The End of the Dream is my attempt to chronicle this decline.

The Process

For the last two years, I have driven tens of thousands of miles all over California photographing empty river beds and reservoirs. I have photographed wildfires that cover millions of acres and encampments large and small. I have slept in my car near National Guard checkpoints and driven for 16 hours at a time. I am trying to create a unique language that binds all three parts of the project together. The visual vocabulary I use is unadorned and without pretense; I often think of a Philip Glass etude or Brutalist architecture when making the images.

I want to show that wildfires, drought, and encampments are all part of a single whole and are connected. At times, it is not clear what an image shows: is that a burned-out house or the start of a homeless encampment? Is that landscape decimated by lack of water or a runaway fire? All the images are devoid of people and are untethered to a specific time or place. Is this 50 years ago or 50 years in the future? Where are these places? Is this even Earth?

I am not interested in blaming one political party or the other for creating these problems. We all have played a part in getting us to where we are today, and I think shaming people isn’t going to work.

Billboards and Posters

Throughout our history, radical change became possible only when we have seen visual evidence of the problem. It wasn’t until the world saw Charles Moore’s images of Bull Connor turning hoses and dogs on protestors in Birmingham that the Civil Rights Bill made progress. Eddie Adams’ photograph of the Vietcong prisoners’ execution hastened the end of the Vietnam War. Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder forced the country to face its racist history. If we are going to begin to address our problems in California we are going to have to look at them.

Final thoughts

My goal with The End of the Dream is to create an unbiased record of California’s condition today. The images are not meant as warnings or calls to action. I only ask that we stop looking away. Simply put, I am taking an inventory. I am like a grocery clerk counting cereal boxes and soup cans in the middle of the night.

Technical Details and Media Response

Technical details: I shoot with 4 Leica M3s. 95% of the time I am on the 28mm and 50mm. Occasionally I use the 90mm and 21mm. I am using Kodak 500T Vision 3 5219 with an 85filter. Colorlab in Rockville, MD processes the film and I am doing rough scans on Pacific Image XT and drum scans for the finals.
The project can be seen here.

The response to the project has been overwhelming. It has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, every newspaper where the billboards were installed and in television stations all over California. If interested you can make a contribution here.

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