Woody Packard

Words + Pictures

Other Explanations



A recent op-ed article in the New York Times noted that in addition to Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns," there is also a class of information that is effectively the "unknown knowns," facts which have been widely known but which we choose to "unknow."
  This is work-in-progress that deals with the rightness or wrongness of displaying and interpreting visual fact. The images are from Pennsylvania, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. They ask you to reject at least part of what looks right to understand the bigger and more complicated story of how this geology was formed and how it has come to rest in its present position. There are ways to deny this evidence, but not without committing serious leaps in the "unknowing" of scientific knowns about the age of the earth and the time required to see change of this magnitude. Several of these images are meant to be displayed in pairs, one image compared to another. I had two of these images framed for a show, and took it as a measure of success that when I picked up the 40" wide prints from the frame shop, the wires had been attached to the wrong sides of one of the images.

close notes—back to pictures

Spring Mills, Uplifted

Spring Mills, Uplifted - 2100420-222panoL

Spring Mills, Uplifted

~ 2100420-222panoL

Uplift at roadcut on US 322 near Spring Mills, PA