The point of departure for this exhibition was the photographic work of the F64 Group which, more than any other artistic movement, helped to construct the image of the American West in the national consciousness. The central image in the exhibition was a photograph of the Prison/Morgue in Ballarat, California, a ghost town on the outskirts of Death Valley, which stood as a subtle reminder that, though rarely pictured, these landscapes were rarely as barren as they appear, and were often the sites of great human tragedy. Indigenous communities, explorers, settlers, criminals, and even murderers roamed these lands which lay outside the boundaries of civilized society. In the exhibition, the Jail/Morgue served as a transitional marker between the front room in which familiar images of a barren or "empty" landscape, gave way to a second gallery, which desplayed a series of simple lines drawings derived from human profiles, and playfully emulated a system of character analysis developed by Johann Kaspar Lavater in the 1780s; A system with which he believed he could determine the moral character of any individual, and which would later influence criminologists, social Darwinists, and even artists, throughout the nineteenth century. Like linear patterns of sand, these seemingly random lines come together to form a new kind of landscape image, created by combining over 200 human profiles from nine different catagories, each meant as a playful critique on Lavater's own methodology.

On display in the center of the back gallery was a device for obtaining silhouettes, derived from Lavater's own design. Relying on "shade" or shadows (instead of on the light required by film cameras) Lavater's Machine for Drawing Silhouettes predated the camera by less than half a century, and made simular claims for the machine's objectivity. In juxtaposing these two systems, the exhibition invites us to question how we look at photographs, and perhaps invites us to imagine that which lies beyond the camera's view.

The exhibition was presented at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles.