shashasha

After having lived in New York for twenty years, during one of the first lockdowns of the Corona pandemic American photographer Peter Sutherland decided to move back to Colorado, the state where he had grown up; the state of his childhood memories.

Many of Sutherland’s photographs in the series are situated at intersections of humans and nature, were taken during hikes, camping trips, first adventurous journeys with his child. Rooted in his own personal experience, his own personal memories, the images in “Colorado” yet reach across boundaries and manage to resonate. As the artist Maia Ruth Lee (Sutherland’s wife and mother of their child) writes in her foreword, “Memory is an interesting thing because I’m not sure what comes first: the memory, or the documentation of that memory? … That is a driving force in Peter’s work—what is he leaving behind? What memories will be cherished?” With the world regaining its chronographic footing, its sense of time again, the careful, thoughtful approach to moments and remembering in “Colorado” seems especially important.

“Peter is an uncompromising documentarian. He doesn’t miss an opportunity to capture memories. His works aren’t like Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, or images of distress, but things he wants to remember, however mundane or ordinary. He sees things that I will never see, and that is his gift.”
― from Maia Ruth Lee’s foreword

“Colorado” also includes in interview with Peter Sutherland by Leo Fitzpatrick (all texts included in English).