“There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.” ~ Aldo Leopold

Edgar’s work investigates the tangled sociocultural, ecological, and political-economic subtleties of human/environment relationships. He explores how these socio-environmental systems are as much a result of a person’s aesthetic, ethical dispositions, and social norms, as it is their ecological understanding. The complexity of these problems requires the joining of scientific and artistic ways of knowing, thus he focuses his attention on epistemic experiences. Specifically, he examines how aesthetic and semiotic framings encode particular assumptions and ideologies about our relationships to each other and to our environments. While the majority of his work has focused on the landscape – sustainability having a significant social justice component – has necessitated that he oscillate between landscape and portraiture.

Ultimately, he seeks to disrupt hegemonic human/environment representations and create a heightened sense of awareness about the systems we create, maintain, and adopt. By engaging in poetic and often metaphorical visual language, he explores the dynamics of the human-environment nexus, our assumptions around what landscapes – and those who occupy those landscapes – represents for us and our own agency in its destruction or transformation.

Susan Sontag noted that, “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at.” Through sequencing still and moving images, he works to “alter and enlarge” narratives that challenge how we understand our relationship to everyday landscapes and the people who occupy them. Ultimately, his work emphasizes the need for interaction in everyday ecologies as a method for illuminating what is obvious but often overlooked: we are not separate from each other or our environments.