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.

“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