“T
here are 4.5 million acres of land under the Bureau of Land Management. I wondered how people are using that landscape,” says Daniel George, a photographer who grew up in Nebraska and now teaches at BYU. “What I found is how many people go shooting in the sagebrush. They clear out a space in the brush, one with a slight berm to stop the bullets and use it for target shooting and just shooting anything, really. I became interested in the impact of target shooting. I started looking at the objects left behind and found trash is a huge problem. Whatever is serving as a target generally stays right there. They tend to be items someone bought for a use—a toaster, a microwave, a can—but the use expired so they’re used as a target, then abandoned,” says George. “In 1914 Marcel Duchamps said anything displayed in a gallery becomes art—in that view, these become readymade scu[tires,” Daniel says. Daniel spent 6-7 months collecting objects, then took 100 of them to his studio, lighted and photographed them. And yes, they are beautiful. And meaningful, especially in our time. These bullet-riddled objects were changed by violence, in a way emblematic of the violence and destruction in the world today. Daniel George’s photographs are available online, danielgeorgephoto.net. One of his readymade images will be part of Granary Arts exhibit in Ephraim called “Demarcation: Contemporary Photography in Utah.” granaryarts.org’; danielgeorgephoto.net
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