Photographer Alana Perino is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From her project ‘American Terrarium‘. To see Alana’s body of work click on any photograph.
The United States’ landscape reveals essential contradictions within this country’s narrative of homeland and national identity. Official and unofficial “American” heritage sites draw in crowds of tourists: people captivated by nostalgia. Efforts to engage visitors with a history that privileges a pioneer mythology strip the land of its truth, effectively fencing in a model “America”, alienated from its history, and enclosed as property for the amusement of docile consumers. In “American Terrarium,” I am drawn to the brief superficial stops of visitors looking to reinforce or challenge a constructed identity that denies this country’s history of settler colonialism. I highlight the curation disguised as preservation that occurs at celebrated landmarks. These scenes, or as I prefer to call them, terrariums, are artificial landscapes arranged for the perpetuation of the great American myth.
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By Alana Perino
