Moments ago, in the landscape’s own slow time, this water was snow. The evidence has not finished leaving: white patches still hold the brown grass, while below them meltwater pools across the track, already the color of sky. The photograph falls in the pause between states, winter concluded, spring unannounced, when a place belongs to no season and quietly speaks in two tongues.
The tall trees at the right arch over everything, and the dark water repeats them upside down, so that the poorest corner of the frame owns its double. Nothing here is famous. No monument, no address, only straw-colored grass, low mounds, a grey sky combed with cloud. The photographer gives his pictures numbers instead of names, and I have come to read that as a form of honesty: to name a place is to claim it, and he claims only that he stood here, in the cold, and paid attention. Attention, sustained, is a kind of tenderness.
He was born in Kent, Ohio, and lives near San Francisco; between those two facts lies a continent of roadsides he has spent his life photographing, often through the car window, in weather that empties the road of everyone else. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. This one, an archival pigment print, holds the thaw permanently unresolved: snow never quite gone, water never quite risen, trees leaning over their reflections as if over sleeping children. The year moved on and completed itself; the print keeps what the year could not, its hesitation.
Moments ago, in the landscape’s own slow time, this water was snow. The evidence has not finished leaving: white patches still hold the brown grass, while below them meltwater pools across the track, already the color of sky. The photograph falls in the pause between states, winter concluded, spring unannounced, when a place belongs to no season and quietly speaks in two tongues.
The tall trees at the right arch over everything, and the dark water repeats them upside down, so that the poorest corner of the frame owns its double. Nothing here is famous. No monument, no address, only straw-colored grass, low mounds, a grey sky combed with cloud. The photographer gives his pictures numbers instead of names, and I have come to read that as a form of honesty: to name a place is to claim it, and he claims only that he stood here, in the cold, and paid attention. Attention, sustained, is a kind of tenderness.
He was born in Kent, Ohio, and lives near San Francisco; between those two facts lies a continent of roadsides he has spent his life photographing, often through the car window, in weather that empties the road of everyone else. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. This one, an archival pigment print, holds the thaw permanently unresolved: snow never quite gone, water never quite risen, trees leaning over their reflections as if over sleeping children. The year moved on and completed itself; the print keeps what the year could not, its hesitation.