A wet road always promises more than it can deliver; that’s why we keep driving down them. This one climbs away between its fence posts toward a horizon it has no real intention of reaching, gleaming like poured pewter under a sky that can’t decide between grey and an improbable teal. And strewn across all this, the rain on the glass has become a drift of soft white orbs, weather promoted to ornament.
The orbs give the game away: this is the view from the driver’s seat, wipers off, engine presumably idling. Plenty of great American landscape photography has been made sitting down, in the dry, with the heater on — a thought I find consoling. Out of focus, the drops stop being rain and become the sky’s own floaters, drifting across grey cloud. Meanwhile the road does what wet roads do, insisting that somewhere better lies just over the rise, while the rust-coloured grass and the flooded field to the right suggest, gently, otherwise.
He has made a career of this view: an Ohioan transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area who drives bad-weather roads and photographs them through the windshield, titling the results with plain numbers, as though words would only slow things down. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all hold his prints, which suggests the strategy works. As an archival pigment print the picture keeps every disputed colour intact — the pewter shine of the asphalt, that teal argument at the top of the sky — so the road can go on promising, indefinitely, from the wall.
A wet road always promises more than it can deliver; that’s why we keep driving down them. This one climbs away between its fence posts toward a horizon it has no real intention of reaching, gleaming like poured pewter under a sky that can’t decide between grey and an improbable teal. And strewn across all this, the rain on the glass has become a drift of soft white orbs, weather promoted to ornament.
The orbs give the game away: this is the view from the driver’s seat, wipers off, engine presumably idling. Plenty of great American landscape photography has been made sitting down, in the dry, with the heater on — a thought I find consoling. Out of focus, the drops stop being rain and become the sky’s own floaters, drifting across grey cloud. Meanwhile the road does what wet roads do, insisting that somewhere better lies just over the rise, while the rust-coloured grass and the flooded field to the right suggest, gently, otherwise.
He has made a career of this view: an Ohioan transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area who drives bad-weather roads and photographs them through the windshield, titling the results with plain numbers, as though words would only slow things down. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all hold his prints, which suggests the strategy works. As an archival pigment print the picture keeps every disputed colour intact — the pewter shine of the asphalt, that teal argument at the top of the sky — so the road can go on promising, indefinitely, from the wall.