The road at dusk is one of American photography’s founding subjects, but those roads usually run empty; here a pair of headlights comes toward us, small and burning gold at the crest of the lane. That one change of cast rewrites the genre: the empty highway promised freedom, an oncoming car proposes plot. Everything else is the tradition’s inventory, bare trees, black hedgerows, power lines stitching the blue sky, and the flare is the intruder.
Its allegiances are as much cinematic as photographic: the whole frame is graded a deep, chilled blue, the near brush dissolves into soft dark masses, and we watch from the height of a driver’s seat, headlamps approaching ours. Nothing happens; everything impends. A viewer supplies the dread or the homecoming according to taste. This is the register contemporary art photography learned to prize, the still that implies a screenplay, and it is handled here without a single prop or actor beyond the anonymous car. The suspense is entirely atmospheric, and it does not resolve.
The photographer has made the fogged road one of his signatures, alongside the lamplit suburban house; born in Kent, Ohio in 1968, he works from the San Francisco Bay Area and numbers his images, this one 10791-55, leaving the story untitled as well as unresolved. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. As an archival pigment print the image sustains its long blue tonal reach from dusk into darkness, the two gold points burning at its center, headlights that will be arriving forever.
The road at dusk is one of American photography’s founding subjects, but those roads usually run empty; here a pair of headlights comes toward us, small and burning gold at the crest of the lane. That one change of cast rewrites the genre: the empty highway promised freedom, an oncoming car proposes plot. Everything else is the tradition’s inventory, bare trees, black hedgerows, power lines stitching the blue sky, and the flare is the intruder.
Its allegiances are as much cinematic as photographic: the whole frame is graded a deep, chilled blue, the near brush dissolves into soft dark masses, and we watch from the height of a driver’s seat, headlamps approaching ours. Nothing happens; everything impends. A viewer supplies the dread or the homecoming according to taste. This is the register contemporary art photography learned to prize, the still that implies a screenplay, and it is handled here without a single prop or actor beyond the anonymous car. The suspense is entirely atmospheric, and it does not resolve.
The photographer has made the fogged road one of his signatures, alongside the lamplit suburban house; born in Kent, Ohio in 1968, he works from the San Francisco Bay Area and numbers his images, this one 10791-55, leaving the story untitled as well as unresolved. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. As an archival pigment print the image sustains its long blue tonal reach from dusk into darkness, the two gold points burning at its center, headlights that will be arriving forever.