Involuntary Landscapes interprets my attempts to piece together a historical and cultural consciousness lost when my family emigrated from Portugal and settled in California in the 1970’s. The found photos of an anonymous family in pre-revolutionary Portugal recall the characters and settings of my own family’s stories and evoke recollections of the past. I juxtapose these with deliberately crafted landscape photos from my travels in the California chaparral and the Portuguese montado. Together, these images form unique artworks which interpret the past through the lens of the present to close the distance between myself and the distant stories of my family.