THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The buffalo is an animal so sacred to Americana that it once graced the tails side of the nickel, and it was going off a Southwestern, Spaghetti Western cliff like a lemming, presumably driven on by hunters who nearly pushed the animal to extinction.  The photograph goes far beyond representing the death of the American dream.  In a simple image, it captures the forced, borderline-psycho disillusionment felt by anyone left of center during an age in which the Right was right and homosexual men died because God himself had descended from the heavens to exact his revenge.  This is not Death of a Salesman.  This is the photographic equivalent of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an indictment of a sick nation reeling in riches and hubris even as it feasted on the weakest, cast the mentally ill out into the streets, and blamed death on the dying.

Sevigny/Guernica