For a current project, Buffalo Trace, my family appropriated scouting as a tribal play frame. Scouting contains a multi-tiered system of rites of passage, from learning social code and simple survival skills, to lifesaving and independent leadership, and even onwards to Order of the Arrow, which is comparable to a spiritual coming of age rite. In our collaboration, my aim has been to reference scouting traditions while allowing my family to become a divergent tribe of scouts that seeks to understand its own limitations in relating to each other, to the natural world, and to the divine.
Zack Bent was born in 1975 in Sunnyvale, California, but considers rural Indiana his formative homeland. He received a BARCH in Architecture and a BS in Environmental Design in 1999 from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, his MA in Photography from Ball State in 2004 and an MFA from the University of Washington in 2008. He currently works collaboratively with his wife Gala and his two sons Ezra and Solomon. Bent lives and works in Seattle, Washington.