In 1971, a hundred photographers fanned out across the country as part of the EPA’s Project Documerica to capture America’s sometimes fabled, sometimes fraught relationship with its land. 

For ETHEL’s Documerica, I traversed the expansive and wondrous Environmental Protection Agency archives, ultimately using 2700 of the total 22,000 photographs available. I selected images based on the themes and energy in each of the fourteen unique, string-based compositions. The visuals accompany the live performance of ETHEL‘s Documerica, which continues to tour with great acclaim.

See Documerica in motion here.

Directed by Steve Cosson
Produced and Performed by ETHEL
Projection Design: Deborah Johnson for CandyStations
Lighting Design: Chris Kuhl
Set Design: Adrian Jones and Deborah Johnson

“Deborah Johnson’s sophisticated constant-motion projections… New music bonding with old images in rich, provocative, and moving ways.” – NY Times

“Sometimes the photographs are played straight, but often they are chopped up, vibrated, overlaid, juxtaposed, variably lit or accompanied by graphics. Some inspire a renewed awe of the beauty and variety of our natural resources — glittering oceans, blooming flowers, towering mesas. Others — cars piled high in a junkyard, darkly sinister coal mines, starkly naked strip mines, churning oil rigs — are deeply disturbing. Together, they provide both a moving memoir of a tumultuous period in our country’s history and a disturbing documentation of humans’ sometimes wanton destruction of nature.” –Herald Tribune