The Reservoir

In the midst of carving out time for my photographic practice, attempting to reduce day to day anxiety, and combating the urge to sleep in every morning, I found myself taking the back roads from our home in Harford County to get to work. My drive consisted of passing through a reservoir in Baltimore County called Loch Raven. It is a vast but quiet place I had been to a few times before.

As a photographer I do not tend to take on projects, but rather carry my camera with me wherever I go and sort all photos that get taken into general categories. The previous year I gave myself one of my first real project ideas that had a definitive concept, style, and most importantly an end. What was taken during the allotted time would be what it would be. I found this process very refreshing from my usual pace and with my new found interest in the reservoir, I decided to make Loch Raven my new subject. These projects are solely about site specificity; as long as the photo was taken at the location the project is about, it doesn’t matter what the photo contains within the frame. This method led me to return on a daily basis for months; returning to the same locations with the changing of the seasons, documenting the migration and vacation of wildlife, and making memories within the borders of the land. In addition to the camera based work put into this ongoing project, I found the history of the location to be just as interesting as the visual elements of the reservoir.

From 1840 to 1880, the population of Baltimore city tripled in size. With the influx of people and creation of new businesses, the city found themselves falling short in many areas and not being able to keep up infrastructure and basic city amenities for the new inhabitance. One of the issues the city faced was the shortage of drinking water. For decades prior, the Jones Falls had provided water to the city as well as several smaller reservoirs however the mills upstream had turned the Jones Falls into a complete cesspool of pollutants and chemical waste. The Gunpowder Falls, a river that flowed from the northern section of the county into the Chesapeake Bay, became a focal point. The planners decided on Gunpowder Falls as the river they would dam to create a reservoir of water that would be piped into Baltimore City. In 1881 the first dam was complete.

In the coming years, the city soon realized that their solution did not work. Baltimore’s population continued to grow and Gunpowder Falls did not cut the demand. The city would go on to acquire land around the banks of the Gunpowder Falls for the creation of a larger dam which would create a reservoir full of drinking water. On the banks of the river sat the town of Warren, MD. Warren was mainly a cotton mill town with almost one- thousand residents. In 1922 the citizens of Warren were relocated and parts of the town leveled. Gunpowder Falls soon flooded what was left of the town and the rest of the valley. Few settlements were left that the water had not yet touched; the Glen Ellen mansion, or “castle,” being one of the most famed. However, only the foundation and front steps remain.

These site specific photos aim to show an objective look at Loch Raven without the influence of color, people, out of ordinary perspectives, or other physical/digital manipulations. For those of us who care to get into the technical linguistics; most all of the photos were taken with a 35mm focal length or a 90mm. The 35mm offers a very realistic “what you actually would see” field of view which was important for me to accuracy display the landscapes.