Mid-reach, a broken limb juts from the tall tree on the right, splintered pale at the break, so the street seems photographed in the act of coming apart. The rest holds still: wet asphalt patched and puddled, a dark car waiting at the kerb, a white house at the edge, bare trees in procession toward a sky banked with cloud. Green survives only in the verge at the left.
And it holds still at one remove, because the camera is looking through mist on glass: a pale bloom drifts up the middle of the frame, softening the trunks, silvering the road. Photography’s oldest boast is transparency, the clean pane between us and the world. This picture gives up the boast and keeps the pane. It describes two things at once, a street in winter and the act of looking at it from inside something warmer, and the second description is the one we feel. Windshield or window, it hardly matters; the vapor is the signature of a body behind the lens, breathing.
He has worked this seam for years, driving ordinary American streets and letting weather do the developing; born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he numbers his pictures, 10844-2, like frames from one long continuous take. Museums including SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney collect them. The archival pigment print renders the vaporous register without hardening it, grey into green into the brown of wet asphalt. Up at the right, the snapped branch waits out its interrupted fall.
Mid-reach, a broken limb juts from the tall tree on the right, splintered pale at the break, so the street seems photographed in the act of coming apart. The rest holds still: wet asphalt patched and puddled, a dark car waiting at the kerb, a white house at the edge, bare trees in procession toward a sky banked with cloud. Green survives only in the verge at the left.
And it holds still at one remove, because the camera is looking through mist on glass: a pale bloom drifts up the middle of the frame, softening the trunks, silvering the road. Photography’s oldest boast is transparency, the clean pane between us and the world. This picture gives up the boast and keeps the pane. It describes two things at once, a street in winter and the act of looking at it from inside something warmer, and the second description is the one we feel. Windshield or window, it hardly matters; the vapor is the signature of a body behind the lens, breathing.
He has worked this seam for years, driving ordinary American streets and letting weather do the developing; born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he numbers his pictures, 10844-2, like frames from one long continuous take. Museums including SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney collect them. The archival pigment print renders the vaporous register without hardening it, grey into green into the brown of wet asphalt. Up at the right, the snapped branch waits out its interrupted fall.