Over the past two years, I have dedicated my efforts to a series of billboard installations titled "The End of the Dream," which aims to depict and raise awareness about the three crises threatening California's survival: the housing crisis, wildfires, and drought.

During the summer of 2022, I installed 22 billboards in three locations across California as a means to test the effectiveness of the concept. These billboards were placed in Oroville (six billboards), Oakland (eight billboards), and Palm Springs (eight billboards). Each billboard featured a single image without any accompanying text or call to action. Additionally, in the last five months, I have also installed over 600 oversized posters in various areas of Northern California.

The response to the installations thus far has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the billboards, and they have garnered significant coverage from television stations and newspapers throughout the state. Up until this point, I have personally financed the project.

From the gold rush in the 1840s to the tech boom of the 2010s, the California Dream has always represented the promise of fresh starts, freedom, and limitless prosperity. However, recent years have seen the dream threatened by extreme wildfires, droughts, and a homelessness crisis, making California's future appear more like a dystopia than a paradise. Encampments resembling those in the poorest countries now exist in every city, wildfires burn uncontrollably for months, and once-in-a-generation droughts have become commonplace. As Ben Jackson wrote in the London Review of Books in 2021, "This year is not the new normal; if anything, we will never have it so good again." "The End of the Dream" serves as my attempt to chronicle this decline and draw attention to California's current state.

Over the past two years, I have traveled tens of thousands of miles throughout California, photographing empty river beds, reservoirs, vast wildfires covering millions of acres, and encampments of various sizes. This work is far from glamorous, often involving nights spent sleeping in my car near National Guard checkpoints and enduring 16-hour drives. Nonetheless, it is a labor of passion and commitment.

My objective is to create a unique visual language that unifies all three aspects of the project. I employ an unadorned visual vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the minimalist beauty of a Philip Glass etude or the rawness of Brutalist architecture when capturing the images. My intention is to show that wildfires, droughts, and encampments are interconnected parts of a larger crisis. Some of the images deliberately blur the lines, making it unclear whether we are looking at a burned-out house or the start of a homeless encampment, a landscape devastated by water scarcity or ravaged by a runaway fire. Devoid of people and detached from a specific time or place, the images provoke contemplation about their temporal and spatial context. Is this 50 years ago or 50 years in the future? Where are these places? Is this even Earth?

Initially, my aspiration was to showcase my work through a traditional gallery exhibition or a book, taking inspiration from the works of esteemed photographers like Susan Meiselas and Bruce Davidson. However, attending a gallery show by a prominent documentary photographer in California last year shifted my perspective.

With "The End of the Dream," I am not interested in assigning blame to any specific political party for creating these problems. We have all played a role in getting to where we are today, and I believe that shaming people will not lead to effective solutions. Over the past

My goal with The End of the Dream is to create an unbiased record of California’s condition today. The images are not meant as warnings or calls to action. I only ask that we stop looking away. Simply put, I am taking an inventory. I am like a grocery clerk counting cereal boxes and soup cans in the middle of the night.