This limited edition photograph by contemprorary artist Paul Turounet is calm yet charged. It is a powerful stand-alone frame from a much larger series, Somewhere out there, something is happening. The expansive photographic essay contemplates nearly 20 sites across the United States of America. Together, the Somewhereout there something is happening oeuvre acts as a catalog of the psychology of the Contemporary American Landscape. Turounet’s photographs pause in spaces worthy of reflection and reverence. He has focused on such settings as the rolling hills of Wounded Knee, memorials for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, the aftermath of a EF5-rated tornado in Joplin, MO, the remains of Manzinar War Relocation Camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the light streaming through a Mississippi forest where Civil Rights champions met a tragic fate. Turounet’s photographs act as artifacts to a moment of reverence in spaces of national history and conscience – they are are means by which viewers may access and contemplate these same emotions and spaces. This image and works from the greater project were recently presented in a 2-man exhibition All that remains.

This beautiful sunrise image of two buffalo locked head-to-head is expansive and timeless. We could say the photograph speaks for itself, but quickly find it has more than one story, rather opens the door to the history and the future, as well as the symbolic or allegorical pathways. Buffalo once covered the American western plains. So numerous were the herd that the sight of them could reach beyond the horizon. Their extinction was believed impossible, yet their near eradication was also championed as the mark of civilization. The wild, thunderous, and migratory nature the buffalo represented in the landscape has been beaten back as farmland replaced prairie. The buffalo were targets for mass slaughter; they were exploited for their coats and meat, their skins were turned to leather for mechanical belts of industrial mills, and their bones were ground for use as pigment or fertilizer. They were also simply shot for sport. Ironically, the buffalo were saved by affluent zoologists and philanthropists, Andrew Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt among them. The western mystique would be lost without bison on the plains, they felt. Now in recovery, buffalo were named the first national mammal by President Obama in 2016. Full of hope and light from the promise of another day, this photograph also stirs a bit of tension- will confrontation erupt between individuals? Is this a squaring off, a measuring up, or just a bold meeting.