What is a road for, if not for leaving? Here is one, wet and grey, running straight into a fog that erases its destination, flanked by flat fields I cannot name. The general sense of the image, its studium if you like, is legible at once: American emptiness, weather, the melancholy of transit. I understand it the way I understand a sentence, and understanding it, I could almost pass on.
But I do not pass on, because of the sign. Far off, at the vanishing point, a small diamond road marker stands alone, too distant to read, insisting on a warning I will never receive. It is this detail that wounds, a mute instruction addressed to no one, a semaphore in the mist. Everything else is sky, an enormous cloud unfurling over two-thirds of the frame like a slow catastrophe that never arrives.
The photograph, an archival pigment print on aluminium from A Road Divided, gives me the paradox I return to in every picture I love: it is entirely impersonal and yet it speaks to me alone. That anonymous sign, addressed to every passing driver and therefore to no one, becomes, absurdly, mine. I supply the message it withholds; I write, into the fog, the departure the road proposes and the arrival it declines to promise.
What is a road for, if not for leaving? Here is one, wet and grey, running straight into a fog that erases its destination, flanked by flat fields I cannot name. The general sense of the image, its studium if you like, is legible at once: American emptiness, weather, the melancholy of transit. I understand it the way I understand a sentence, and understanding it, I could almost pass on.
But I do not pass on, because of the sign. Far off, at the vanishing point, a small diamond road marker stands alone, too distant to read, insisting on a warning I will never receive. It is this detail that wounds, a mute instruction addressed to no one, a semaphore in the mist. Everything else is sky, an enormous cloud unfurling over two-thirds of the frame like a slow catastrophe that never arrives.
The photograph, an archival pigment print on aluminium from A Road Divided, gives me the paradox I return to in every picture I love: it is entirely impersonal and yet it speaks to me alone. That anonymous sign, addressed to every passing driver and therefore to no one, becomes, absurdly, mine. I supply the message it withholds; I write, into the fog, the departure the road proposes and the arrival it declines to promise.