Amanda
Breitbach

Land/People

Land/People is a body of work that addresses the human relationship to place. The project combines aerial and panoramic images of my family’s farmland in eastern Montana with intimate photographs of domestic spaces.
Each photograph consciously reflects my own subjective experience of and relationship to the land. My framing and interpretation of the view is fundamentally shaped by my background as a woman who grew up on a multi-generational family farm and ranch owned and operated by men, developing a deep love and respect for the land while knowing that I would never inherit it. The interior photographs are meant to contrast with the landscape images in several meaningful ways: in scale, intimacy, and in their sense of time and impermanence. Together, they tell a complicated story about this land and the people who live there.
Ideas that I hope to make visible through the work include the legacy of agriculture in the American West, the gender bias often inherent in such a traditional enterprise, the changing nature of farming in an increasingly corporate agriculture industry, and the emotional/spiritual ties that connect people to land.
Some of the questions that I am exploring are simple: Who will farm in the future, and how will we continue? Others are more complex. I believe that the diminishing number of farmers is part of a deep societal disconnection from land that feeds ignorance about ecology as well as agriculture; if we don’t work on the land, how can we learn to value and care for it?