What does a road photograph promise that it never keeps? Here, in Mississippi, Jessica Lange gives us the bare grammar of the series itself: an empty highway running off to the left, a shoulder of pale gravel, a tilled field on the right, and planted between them the small shield reading SOUTH 61. The sign names the whole project and settles nothing. It points the way one is already going. A direction, on an open plain, is less an instruction than a confession of distance.
The sky takes two-thirds of the frame, mottled with cloud, and beneath it the land lies stripped and wintry, furrows raked toward a low black hedge of trees. Far down the road, almost lost, stand other signs too small to read — the eye walks toward them and is not rewarded. This is a landscape that withholds incident. Nothing happens; nothing is about to. The melancholy of such places is not that they are empty but that they are so legible, so completely what they are, with no second meaning held in reserve.
To make a picture of a number on a post is to admit that the subject of the journey is the journey's own dwindling. Highway 61 carries its mythology — the blues, the migrations northward, the long American habit of leaving — but Lange refuses the anthem and keeps the asphalt. The grain settles like dust over field and cloud alike, binding them. What remains, after the sentiment has burned off, is the plainest fact a photograph can offer: a road, a sign, a winter field, and the obligation to go on.
What does a road photograph promise that it never keeps? Here, in Mississippi, Jessica Lange gives us the bare grammar of the series itself: an empty highway running off to the left, a shoulder of pale gravel, a tilled field on the right, and planted between them the small shield reading SOUTH 61. The sign names the whole project and settles nothing. It points the way one is already going. A direction, on an open plain, is less an instruction than a confession of distance.
The sky takes two-thirds of the frame, mottled with cloud, and beneath it the land lies stripped and wintry, furrows raked toward a low black hedge of trees. Far down the road, almost lost, stand other signs too small to read — the eye walks toward them and is not rewarded. This is a landscape that withholds incident. Nothing happens; nothing is about to. The melancholy of such places is not that they are empty but that they are so legible, so completely what they are, with no second meaning held in reserve.
To make a picture of a number on a post is to admit that the subject of the journey is the journey's own dwindling. Highway 61 carries its mythology — the blues, the migrations northward, the long American habit of leaving — but Lange refuses the anthem and keeps the asphalt. The grain settles like dust over field and cloud alike, binding them. What remains, after the sentiment has burned off, is the plainest fact a photograph can offer: a road, a sign, a winter field, and the obligation to go on.