Fog is the great editor. It removes the world in order to hand back a little of it, and here it has erased nearly everything past the near curve of a road, leaving a chain-link fence to stagger off to the right and lose itself, a single pole, an embankment, then nothing that can be named. A photograph is usually praised for what it includes; this one draws its force from all it declines to show.
There is a moral tone to such reticence. We are used to the camera as an instrument of possession, seizing the visible and keeping it as evidence. This foggy road refuses the transaction. It offers instead the condition of not-quite-seeing, the mild dread of driving into weather, and asks us to sit with uncertainty rather than master it — an unfashionable request in a culture that photographs everything in order to be sure of it.
Melancholy clings to the image without tipping into sentiment. The muted browns and greys, held in an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, describe an American emptiness neither romantic nor accusing, merely true. Part of A Road Divided, it proposes that the way ahead is always partly withheld, and that this, more than any destination, is the real subject of a life spent in transit.
Fog is the great editor. It removes the world in order to hand back a little of it, and here it has erased nearly everything past the near curve of a road, leaving a chain-link fence to stagger off to the right and lose itself, a single pole, an embankment, then nothing that can be named. A photograph is usually praised for what it includes; this one draws its force from all it declines to show.
There is a moral tone to such reticence. We are used to the camera as an instrument of possession, seizing the visible and keeping it as evidence. This foggy road refuses the transaction. It offers instead the condition of not-quite-seeing, the mild dread of driving into weather, and asks us to sit with uncertainty rather than master it — an unfashionable request in a culture that photographs everything in order to be sure of it.
Melancholy clings to the image without tipping into sentiment. The muted browns and greys, held in an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, describe an American emptiness neither romantic nor accusing, merely true. Part of A Road Divided, it proposes that the way ahead is always partly withheld, and that this, more than any destination, is the real subject of a life spent in transit.