Starting today, the editors of Sight Unseen were asked to curate a week’s worth of photographers for Bite! Magazine, an online showcase for talented snappers. Our week kicks off with Mark Mahaney, a Brooklyn-based photographer with whom we’ve worked for several years, and continues with Mike Vorrasi, Darin Mickey, Paul Paper, and more. We’ve excerpted a few of Mark’s photographs and his artist’s statement here, but for a complete slideshow and to sign up for the Bite! newsletter, click here. Be sure to check Bite! throughout the week for more of Sight Unseen’s picks.

Artist’s statement by Mark Mahaney

I have a fascination with the Oregon Trail — the purpose it served in American history and the seemingly endless possibilities it symbolized for the hundreds of thousands of pioneers who traversed the almost yearlong and extremely grueling, sometimes deadly course. I’ve started to loosely travel this course, winding from Missouri to Western Oregon. The photographs created from this project will serve as a document of the modern Oregon Trail – what stands in these territories today, both its people and its places – and what has resulted from the possibilities of America’s great western migration.

The project is a cultural commentary born out of my frequent disappointment with that which is considered to be American “progress.” This isn’t simply a project to show what’s around the Oregon Trail today, but instead a project about what its appearance tells us about ourselves as a people and a culture.

Manifest Destiny – a feeling of divinely ordained entitlement to the land and its resources, a blessed situation in which mistakes seemed impossible and possibilities seemed limitless – was not only a massive driving force for the western expansion of the United States in the mid 1800s, but quickly became a prevailing and lasting American mentality. Many national and global issues have arisen from this ‘no consequence’ mentality and have created a way of life we must now rethink.

At its broadest sense, this project is about documenting an American lifestyle at a turning point, using as its setting one of the geographical pathways that most defined American idealism.