The utility poles read as script: tall capitals from an alphabet that has forgotten its language, planted in a line beside the mud. I follow them left to right, the way I would follow a sentence, and the sentence refuses to end; it climbs the rutted road toward a crest and stops where the sky begins. Wires once meant messages. Here they mean only distance, and the streetlamp leaning into the frame waits for an evening that has not arrived.
I know the picture was made through glass, because rain has left its circles floating before the scene, pale coins that belong to no pocket. The sun is a white burn behind thin cloud; the blue in the upper corner is the day’s one certainty. What undoes my composure is smaller still: a single puddle in the middle of the track, returning the light exactly, as if the road had opened an eye. Around it the winter brush blurs, agitated, though nothing in the photograph moves.
This is how he photographs: from the driver’s seat, through weather, in the American elsewhere he has made his own since leaving Kent, Ohio, where he was born in 1968, for the San Francisco Bay Area. He numbers his pictures rather than naming them, so that 10275 stays a cipher, a diary page written in light and read by strangers. Museums keep the diary now: SFMOMA, the Getty, the Whitney. The archival pigment print holds every dissolve and grain of sediment, and the row of poles goes on spelling, patiently, its beautiful nothing.
The utility poles read as script: tall capitals from an alphabet that has forgotten its language, planted in a line beside the mud. I follow them left to right, the way I would follow a sentence, and the sentence refuses to end; it climbs the rutted road toward a crest and stops where the sky begins. Wires once meant messages. Here they mean only distance, and the streetlamp leaning into the frame waits for an evening that has not arrived.
I know the picture was made through glass, because rain has left its circles floating before the scene, pale coins that belong to no pocket. The sun is a white burn behind thin cloud; the blue in the upper corner is the day’s one certainty. What undoes my composure is smaller still: a single puddle in the middle of the track, returning the light exactly, as if the road had opened an eye. Around it the winter brush blurs, agitated, though nothing in the photograph moves.
This is how he photographs: from the driver’s seat, through weather, in the American elsewhere he has made his own since leaving Kent, Ohio, where he was born in 1968, for the San Francisco Bay Area. He numbers his pictures rather than naming them, so that 10275 stays a cipher, a diary page written in light and read by strangers. Museums keep the diary now: SFMOMA, the Getty, the Whitney. The archival pigment print holds every dissolve and grain of sediment, and the row of poles goes on spelling, patiently, its beautiful nothing.