Finding Freedom in the Parting of the Ways

Conclusion

If, as Hannah Arendt argues, “we first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves,” (148) I ask how Shafer’s return to uninhabited spaces that are clearly marked by other humans might interrogate American concepts of liberty? Arendt argues that “men are free – as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom – as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same” (153). For Arendt, freedom is expressed through the phenomenon of virtuosity and the decisions that one makes through their own free will. Nonetheless, free will is not independence, nor sovereignty. Indeed, Arendt demands that, “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (165). I ask then, how might Shafer’s photographic practice work to question the privileged status of the individual as their photographic images unravel the durability of U.S. imperialism and neoliberal extractvism? In the act of documenting mystified sites of the Western frontier, how do Shafer’s photographs work to untangle the rhetoric of freedom from the sublime?

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