IDLE FRONTIER is a collection of large-format alternative photographic prints by Bradley Verhelle.  The project explores historical, contemporary, and personal accounts of the land on which the Seneca Army Depot once stood in a story that stretches from before the 1940s to the present and beyond.  The ‘frontier’ is the edge between the known and unknown, a place so ripe for discovery that we associate the word with exploitation of resources and of people.  Unlike most frontiers, this land has already been exploited, squandered, and tainted.  Despite the site’s repeated history of dispossession, the Seneca Army Depot has regressed back into the realm of the unknown and the undiscovered.  The ‘unknown’ of the Depot is degenerative, as if the site has been re-shrouded in mystery.

 

            This project began as an investigation of a 10,587-acre site, a site I would pass weekly on my drive home up Route 96-A, and a site I knew surprisingly little about.  At dusk and at dawn, the white deer emerge, looking through the still air and rusted barbed-wire fence.  Watching those ghostly figures has never failed to inflict me with a deep sense of unease and wonder.  The deer are beautiful and eye-catching animals.  I would find later that they can even be spotted in satellite and aerial imagery.

 

            My mother told me the site was a prison, home to the Five Points Correctional Facility.  Looking at the environment of the Depot, the miles of barbed-wire punctuated with derelict guard-booths, the shoe seemed to fit.  For years, I assumed the Manhattan-sized plot of land was a monumental prison.  In truth, the Correctional Facility takes up a meager plot of land at the southeasternmost corner of the old Depot.  I mention this half-truth, shared to me unknowingly by my mother, because knowledge of this site is part of a collective.  The collective knowledge developed around a site so large and so impactful fast became the most engaging part of the project.  Documenting the site became less about producing a narrative of my own and more about the production of a public archive—a shared narrative or mutual understanding developed by all those participating in and affected by its source.

 

            This project came about by bringing together resources across several different archives.  I coordinated with the Seneca County Historian, Pamela Becker, to learn about the many land-dispossessions of Seneca County and the accessibility, then and now, of the Seneca Army Depot.  Hundreds of acres were taken from New York residents, many of whom were farmers, when the Depot was first constructed.  Many were required to relocate, some in as little as three days.  From another collection, accounts by the Environmental Protection Agency describe the contemporary effects of PFAs and other forever-chemicals left over from the war effort, which continue to plague the local groundwater, fish, and soil.  With each site visit, I ventured deeper into the depot, past fences, into bunkers, and across the watchful gaze of the native white deer.  The Seneca Army Depot is a relic of a war which scarcely reached its soil.  Today, it stands as a monument to war and loss of life—a slow-healing wound stretching across Seneca County.

 

            There is so much about the Depot which is still veiled in mystery.  Unveiling these mysteries revealed to me how familiar and prolific these sites are.  The Depot doesn’t end at its fenced borders.  For a site which seems so self-contained, lined with physical barriers and dotted with no-trespass signs, it influences those far beyond its borders.  Hundreds of local properties, backyards and farmland alike, share earth and water with the depot.  Farther out is the Lehigh Valley Railroad, an important piece of infrastructure in determining where the Army Depot should be constructed.  It played a crucial role in operations and munitions shipment to and within the depot.  The railroad is part of a long network running from New York City and Allentown, PA through Ithaca, NY, Mendon, NY, and beyond.  It connects towns and cities to the depot, people who have never heard its name are not beyond its sphere.

 

            The project materialized as two separate installations.  The first installation was a series of seven photographic prints, produced in an alternative process darkroom using the Vandyke Brown and Gum Dichromate processes.  After photographing the site, the images were developed one layer at a time.  Layer-by-layer, silver and pigment stained the paper, leeching color and metal into the paper in a slow process of staining and re-staining.  Over time, the color-image, beginning on a handheld sheet of film, is rebirthed on a 40” x 50” sheet of paper.  The scale of each print is a testament to and embodiment of the vastness and stillness of the idle frontier.  This photographic installation was shown at the Soil Factory in Ithaca, NY in 2025.